Academic Journal
Spectrum-based rule- and item-level localization of faults in context-free grammars
| Τίτλος: | Spectrum-based rule- and item-level localization of faults in context-free grammars |
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| Συγγραφείς: | Raselimo, Moeketsi, Fischer, Bernd |
| Στοιχεία εκδότη: | Elsevier |
| Έτος έκδοσης: | 2024 |
| Συλλογή: | Stellenbosch University: SUNScholar Research Repository |
| Θεματικοί όροι: | Debugging in computer science, Parsing (Computer grammar), Computer software -- Testing, Software localization |
| Περιγραφή: | The original publication is available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/ ; We describe and evaluate spectrum-based methods aimed at finding faults in context-free grammars. In their basic form, they take as input a test suite and a parser for the grammar that is modified to collect grammar spectra (i.e., the sets of grammar elements used in attempts to parse the individual test cases), and return as output a ranked list of suspicious elements. We define grammar spectra suitable for localizing faults on the level of the grammar rules (i.e., rule spectra) and the rules’ individual symbols (i.e., item spectra), respectively. We show how both types of grammar spectra can be collected by both LL and LR parsers, and how the JavaCC, ANTLR, and CUP parser generators can be modified and used to automate the collection of the grammar spectra. We also show how grammar spectra can be synthesized directly from test cases derived from a grammar, and how such synthetic spectra can be used to localize differences between a grammar and a black-box system under test. We first evaluate our approach over a large number of medium-sized single fault grammars, which we constructed by fault seeding from a common origin grammar. At the rule level, it ranks the rules containing the seeded faults within the top five rules in about 40%–70% of the cases, depending on the applied parsing technique, test suite, and ranking metric, and pinpoints them (i.e., correctly identifies them as unique most suspicious rule) in about 10%–30% of the cases, with significantly better results for the synthetic spectra. At the item level, our approach remains remarkably effective despite the larger number of possible locations, provided it is coupled with a simple tie-breaking strategy that prefers items with the right-most designated position over other items from the same rules in a tie. It typically ranks the seeded faults within the top five positions in about 30%–60% of the cases, and pinpoints them in about 15%–40% of the cases. This specialized ... |
| Τύπος εγγράφου: | article in journal/newspaper |
| Περιγραφή αρχείου: | 22 Pages; application/pdf |
| Γλώσσα: | English |
| Relation: | https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/133296 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.jss.2024.112067 |
| Διαθεσιμότητα: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112067 https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/133296 |
| Rights: | Authors retain copyright |
| Αριθμός Καταχώρησης: | edsbas.45682751 |
| Βάση Δεδομένων: | BASE |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.jss.2024.112067 |
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