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Leveraging disposable instrumentation to reduce coverage collection overhead
Author(s) -
Chilakamarri KalyanRam,
Elbaum Sebastian
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
software testing, verification and reliability
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1689
pISSN - 0960-0833
DOI - 10.1002/stvr.347
Subject(s) - instrumentation (computer programming) , computer science , overhead (engineering) , suite , java , data collection , embedded system , operating system , reliability engineering , engineering , statistics , mathematics , archaeology , history
Testers use coverage data for test suite quality assessment, stopping criteria definition, and effort allocation. However, as the complexity of products and testing processes increases, the cost of coverage data collection may grow significantly, jeopardizing its potential application. To mitigate this problem this paper presents the concept of ‘disposable coverage instrumentation’—coverage instrumentation that is removed after its execution—through two techniques: local disposal, and collective disposal. A Java virtual machine was extended to support these techniques, and their potential is shown through two studies utilizing the Specjvm98 and Specjbb2000 benchmarks. The results indicate that the techniques can reduce coverage collection overhead by an order of magnitude over state‐of‐the‐art techniques. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.