English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Mutation testing is a means to assess the effectiveness of a test suite andits outcome is considered more meaningful than code coverage metrics. However,despite several optimizations, mutation testing requires a significantcomputational effort and has not been widely adopted in industry. Therefore, westudy in this paper whether test effectiveness can be approximated using a morelight-weight approach. We hypothesize that a test case is more likely to detectfaults in methods that are close to the test case on the call stack than inmethods that the test case accesses indirectly through many other methods.Based on this hypothesis, we propose the minimal stack distance between testcase and method as a new test measure, which expresses how close any test casecomes to a given method, and study its correlation with test effectiveness. Weconducted an empirical study with 21 open-source projects, which comprise intotal 1.8 million LOC, and show that a correlation exists between stackdistance and test effectiveness. The correlation reaches a strength up to 0.58.We further show that a classifier using the minimal stack distance along withadditional easily computable measures can predict the mutation testing resultof a method with 92.9% precision and 93.4% recall. Hence, such a classifier canbe taken into consideration as a light-weight alternative to mutation testingor as a preceding, less costly step to that.

Is the Stack Distance Between Test Case and Method Correlated With Test Effectiveness?