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Record W1609394770 · doi:10.1109/qrs.2015.30

How Effective Are Code Coverage Criteria?

2015· article· en· W1609394770 on OpenAlexaff
Hadi Hemmati

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Manitoba
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCode coverageComputer scienceTest suiteControl flowSet (abstract data type)Code (set theory)Fault coverageMetric (unit)Cover (algebra)Data miningTest caseReliability engineeringProgramming languageSoftwareEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Code coverage is one of the main metrics to measure the adequacy of a test case/suite. It has been studied a lot in academia and used even more in industry. However, a test case may cover a piece of code (no matter what coverage metric is being used) but miss its faults. In this paper, we studied several existing and standard control and data flow coverage criteria on a set of developer-written fault-revealing test cases from several releases of five open source projects. We found that a) basic criteria such as statement coverage is very weak (detecting only 10% of the faults), b) combining several control-flow coverage together is better than the strongest criterion alone (28% vs. 19%), c) a basic data-flow coverage can detect many undetected faults (79% of the undetected faults by control-flow coverage can be detected by a basic def/use pair coverage), and d) on average 15% of the faults may not be detected by any of the standard control and data-flow coverage criteria. Classification of the undetected faults showed that they are mostly to do with specification (missing logic).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.020
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.198
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.020
Threshold uncertainty score0.104

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0200.198
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0120.006
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0050.010
Open science0.0030.002
Research integrity0.0030.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.029
GPT teacher head0.289
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations77
Published2015
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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