skip to main content


Title: Revisiting the relationship between fault detection, test adequacy criteria, and test set size
Award ID(s):
1942055
NSF-PAR ID:
10263933
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEEACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
ISSN:
1938-4300
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. When the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was passed by the US Congress in 1976, its advocates pointed to new generation of genotoxicity tests as a way to systematically screen chemicals for carcinogenicity. However, in the end, TSCA did not require any new testing of commercial chemicals, including these rapid laboratory screens. In addition, although the Environmental Protection Agency was to make public data about the health effects of industrial chemicals, companies routinely used the agency’s obligation to protect confidential business information to prevent such disclosures. This paper traces the contested history of TSCA and its provisions for testing, from the circulation of the first draft bill in the Nixon administration through the debates over its implementation, which stretched into the Reagan administration. The paucity of publicly available health and environmental data concerning chemicals, I argue, was a by-product of the law and its execution, leading to a situation of institutionalized ignorance, the underside of regulatory knowledge. 
    more » « less
  2. Prosody perception is fundamental to spoken language communication as it supports comprehension, pragmatics, morphosyntactic parsing of speech streams, and phonological awareness. A particular aspect of prosody: perceptual sensitivity to speech rhythm patterns in words (i.e., lexical stress sensitivity), is also a robust predictor of reading skills, though it has received much less attention than phonological awareness in the literature. Given the importance of prosody and reading in educational outcomes, reliable and valid tools are needed to conduct large-scale health and genetic investigations of individual differences in prosody, as groundwork for investigating the biological underpinnings of the relationship between prosody and reading. Motivated by this need, we present the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”) and highlight its merits as a phenotyping tool to measure lexical stress sensitivity in as little as 10 min, in scalable internet-based cohorts. In this 28-item speech rhythm perception test [modeled after the stress identification test from Wade-Woolley (2016) ], participants listen to multi-syllabic spoken words and are asked to identify lexical stress patterns. Psychometric analyses in a large internet-based sample shows excellent reliability, and predictive validity for self-reported difficulties with speech-language, reading, and musical beat synchronization. Further, items loaded onto two distinct factors corresponding to initially stressed vs. non-initially stressed words. These results are consistent with previous reports that speech rhythm perception abilities correlate with musical rhythm sensitivity and speech-language/reading skills, and are implicated in reading disorders (e.g., dyslexia). We conclude that TOPsy can serve as a useful tool for studying prosodic perception at large scales in a variety of different settings, and importantly can act as a validated brief phenotype for future investigations of the genetic architecture of prosodic perception, and its relationship to educational outcomes. 
    more » « less
  3. Code coverage is the most widely adopted criteria for measuring test effectiveness in software quality assurance. The performance of coverage criteria (in indicating test suites' effectiveness) has been widely studied in prior work. Most of the studies use randomly constructed pseudo test suites to facilitate data collection for correlation analysis, yet no previous work has systematically studied whether pseudo test suites would lead to inflated correlation results. This paper focuses on the potentially wide-spread threat with a study over 123 real-world Java projects. Following the typical experimental process of studying coverage criteria, we investigate the correlation between statement/assertion coverage and mutation score using both pseudo and original test suites. Except for direct correlation analysis, we control the number of assertions and the test suite size to conduct partial correlation analysis. The results reveal that 1) the correlation (between coverage criteria and mutation score) derived from pseudo test suites is much higher than from original test suites (from 0.21 to 0.39 higher in Kendall value); 2) contrary to previously reported, statement coverage has a stronger correlation with mutation score than assertion coverage. 
    more » « less