A Comprehensive Dynamic Data Flow Analysis of Object-Oriented Programs

Laura Troost, Herbert Kuchen

2022

Abstract

Studies have shown that in the area of testing data-flow coverage is often more effective in exposing errors compared to other approaches such as branch coverage. Thus, evaluating and generating test cases with respect to the data-flow coverage is desirable. Unfortunately, data-flow coverage is rarely considered in practice due to the lack of appropriate tools. Existing tools are typically based on static analysis and cannot distinguish between traversable and non-traversable data flows. They also have typically difficulties with properly handling aliasing and complex data structures. Thus, we propose a tool for dynamically analyzing the data-flow coverage which avoids all these drawbacks. In combination with our existing test-case generator, it enables the creation of an (almost) minimal set of test cases that guarantee all data flows to be covered. We have evaluated our tool based on a couple of benchmarks.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Troost L. and Kuchen H. (2022). A Comprehensive Dynamic Data Flow Analysis of Object-Oriented Programs. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-568-5, pages 267-274. DOI: 10.5220/0010984800003176

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase22,
author={Laura Troost and Herbert Kuchen},
title={A Comprehensive Dynamic Data Flow Analysis of Object-Oriented Programs},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2022},
pages={267-274},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010984800003176},
isbn={978-989-758-568-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - A Comprehensive Dynamic Data Flow Analysis of Object-Oriented Programs
SN - 978-989-758-568-5
AU - Troost L.
AU - Kuchen H.
PY - 2022
SP - 267
EP - 274
DO - 10.5220/0010984800003176