Coverage and Its Discontents
Coverage and Its Discontents
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报道及其不满
DOI：
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发表时间：
2014
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Rahul Gopinath
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Alex Groce;Mohammad Amin Alipour;Rahul Gopinath
每个人都想知道有关测试套件的一件事：它会检测到足够的错误吗？不幸的是，在大多数重要的情况下，直接回答这个问题是不切实际或不可能的。因此，软件工程师和研究人员倾向于依靠各种代码覆盖范围（其中突变测试被认为是句法覆盖的一种形式）。一系列的学术研究工作试图确定依靠覆盖范围作为故障检测的代替是解决测试套件评估问题的合理解决方案。本文认为，与覆盖范围相关的文献的丰富性部分是基本不确定性的迹象，即测量覆盖范围应实现的确是什么，以及我们如何知道它是否能够实现它。我们提出了一些解决方案和缓解方法，但是本文的主要重点是阐明有关此关键问题的当前困惑状况，以进行有效的软件测试。
Everyone wants to know one thing about a test suite: will it detect enough bugs? Unfortunately, in most settings that matter, answering this question directly is impractical or impossible. Software engineers and researchers therefore tend to rely on various measures of code coverage (where mutation testing is considered a form of syntactic coverage). A long line of academic research efforts have attempted to determine whether relying on coverage as a substitute for fault detection is a reasonable solution to the problems of test suite evaluation. This essay argues that the profusion of coverage-related literature is in part a sign of an underlying uncertainty as to what exactly it is that measuring coverage should achieve, as well as how we would know if it can, in fact, achieve it. We propose some solutions and mitigations, but the primary focus of this essay is to clarify the state of current confusions regarding this key problem for effective software testing.