Novel technique for cost reduction in mutation testing

Aimed at the problem of expensive costs in mutation testing which has hampered its wide use,a technique of introducing a test case selection into the process of mutation testing is proposed.For each mutant,a fixed number of test cases are selected to constrain the maximum allowable executions so as to reduce useless work.Test case selection largely depends on the degree of mutation.The mutation distance is an index describing the semantic difference between the original program and the mutated program.It represents the percentage of effective test cases in a test set,so it can be used to guide the selection of test cases.The bigger the mutation distance is,the easier it is that the mutant will be killed,so the corresponding number of effective test cases for this mutant is greater.Experimental results suggest that the technique can remarkably reduce execution costs without a significant loss of test effectiveness.

Mutation Testing for Integer Overflow in Ethereum Smart Contracts

Integer overflow is a common vulnerability in Ethereum Smart Contracts(ESCs)and often causes huge economic losses.Smart contracts cannot be changed once it is deployed on the blockchain and thus demand further testing.Mutation testing is a fault-based testing method that can effectively improve the sufficiency of a test for smart contracts.However,existing methods cannot efficiently perform mutation testing specifically for integer overflow in ESCs.Therefore,by analyzing integer overflow in ESCs,we propose five special mutation operators to address such vulnerability in terms of detecting sufficiency in ESC testing.An empirical study on 40 open-source ESCs is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mutation operators.Results show that(1)our proposed mutation operators can reproduce all 179 integer overflow vulnerabilities in 40 smart contracts,and the generated mutants have high compilation pass rate and integer overflow vulnerability generation rate;moreover,(2)the generated mutants can find the shortcomings of existing testing methods for integer overflow vulnerability,thereby providing effective support to improve the sufficiency of the test.

Spatio-temporal Variation Characteristics of Extreme Climate Events and Their Teleconnections to Large-scale Ocean-atmospheric Circulation Patterns in Huaihe River Basin,China During 1959–2019

Huaihe River Basin(HRB) is located in China’s north-south climatic transition zone,which is very sensitive to global climate change.Based on the daily maximum temperature,minimum temperature,and precipitation data of 40 meteorological stations and nine monthly large-scale ocean-atmospheric circulation indices data during 1959–2019,we present an assessment of the spatial and temporal variations of extreme temperature and precipitation events in the HRB using nine extreme climate indices,and analyze the teleconnection relationship between extreme climate indices and large-scale ocean-atmospheric circulation indices.The results show that warm extreme indices show a significant(P < 0.05) increasing trend,while cold extreme indices(except for cold spell duration) and diurnal temperature range(DTR) show a significant decreasing trend.Furthermore,all extreme temperature indices show significant mutations during 1959-2019.Spatially,a stronger warming trend occurs in eastern HRB than western HRB,while maximum 5-d precipitation(Rx5day) and rainstorm days(R25) show an increasing trend in the southern,central,and northwestern regions of HRB.Arctic oscillation(AO),Atlantic multidecadal oscillation(AMO),and East Atlantic/Western Russia(EA/WR) have a stronger correlation with extreme climate indices compared to other circulation indices.AO and AMO(EA/WR) exhibit a significant(P < 0.05) negative(positive)correlation with frost days and diurnal temperature range.Extreme warm events are strongly correlated with the variability of AMO and EA/WR in most parts of HRB,while extreme cold events are closely related to the variability of AO and AMO in eastern HRB.In contrast,AMO,AO,and EA/WR show limited impacts on extreme precipitation events in most parts of HRB.

A Fault-Based Testing Approach in Safety Critical Medical Systems

The advent of technology has opened unprecedented opportunities in health care delivery system as the demand for intelligent and knowledge-based systems has increased as modern medical practices become more knowledge-intensive. As a result of this, there is greater need to investigate the pervasiveness of software faults in Safety critical medical systems for proper diagnosis. The sheer volume of code in these systems creates significant concerns about the quality of the software. The rate of untimely deaths nowadays is alarming partly due to the medical device used to carry out the diagnosis process. A safety-critical medical (SCM) system is a complex system in which the malfunctioning of software could result in death, injury of the patient or damage to the environment. The malfunctioning of the software could be as a result of the inadequacy in software testing due to test suit problem or oracle problem. Testing a SCM system poses great challenges to software testers. One of these challenges is the need to generate a limited number of test cases of a given regression test suite in a manner that does not compromise its defect detection ability. This paper presents a novel five-stage fault-based testing procedure for SCM, a model-based approach to generate test cases for differential diagnosis of Tuberculosis. We used Prime Path Coverage and Edge-Pair Coverage as coverage criteria to ensure maximum coverage to identify feasible paths. We analyzed the proposed testing procedure with the help of three metrics consisting of Fault Detection Density, Fault Detection Effectiveness and Mutation Adequacy Score. We evaluated the effectiveness of our testing procedure by running the suggested test cases on a sample historical data of tuberculosis patients. The experimental results show that our developed testing procedure has some advantages such as creating mutant graphs and Fuzzy Cognitive Map Engine while resolving the problem of eliminating infeasible test cases for effective decision making.

Establishment and application of a multiplex genetic mutation-detection method of lung cancer based on MassARRAY platform

Objective: This study aims to establish a method for highly parallel multiplexed detection of genetic mutations in Chinese lung cancer samples through Agena i PLEX chemistry and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight analysis on Mass ARRAY mass spectrometry platform.Methods: We reviewed the related literature and data on lung cancer treatments. We also identified 99 mutation hot spots in 13 target genes closely related to the pathogenesis, drug resistance, and metastasis of lung cancer. A total of 297 primers, composed of99 paired forward and reverse amplification primers and 99 matched extension primers, were designed using Assay Design software. The detection method was established by analyzing eight cell lines and six lung cancer specimens. The proposed method was then validated through comparisons by using a Lung Carta^(TM) kit. The sensitivity and specificity of the proposed method were evaluated by directly sequencing EGFR and KRAS genes in 100 lung cancer cases.Results: The proposed method was able to detect multiplex genetic mutations in lung cancer cell lines. This finding was consistent with the observations on previously reported mutations. The proposed method can also detect such mutations in clinical lung cancer specimens. This result was consistent with the observations with Lung Carta^(TM) kit. However, an FGFR2 mutation was detected only through the proposed method. The measured sensitivity and specificity were 100% and 96.3%, respectively.Conclusions: The proposed Mass ARRAY technology-based multiplex method can detect genetic mutations in Chinese lung cancer patients. Therefore, the proposed method can be applied to detect mutations in other cancer tissues.

Relationship between Precipitation Characteristics and Solar Activity in Fuxin from 1951 to 2019

Based on the monthly precipitation data in Fuxin from 1951 to 2019,the M-K and Pettitt mutation test,Morlet wavelet analysis,CWT,XWT and WTC methods were used to study the correlation between precipitation and sunspots in Fuxin in the past 69 years.The results show that from 1951 to 2019,only the spring precipitation in Fuxin showed an upward trend,and annual precipitation,the precipitation in the other three seasons and the annual number of sunspots all showed a relatively obvious downward trend.The first main cycles of annual precipitation,the annual number of sunspots,spring,summer,autumn and winter precipitation were quasi-28,quasi-16,quasi-51,quasi-51,quasi-27 and quasi-11 years,respectively.Annual precipitation,the annual number of sunspots,spring,summer,autumn and winter precipitation changed suddenly in 1980,2005,2005,1980,1992 and 1980,respectively.Both annual precipitation and seasonal precipitation had a relatively obvious resonance cycle of 5-15 years with sunspots,indicating that there was a good correlation between the annual number of sunspots and annual precipitation on an interannual scale.

Reduction of Faults in Software Testing by Fault Domination

Although mutation testing is one of the practical ways of enhancing test effectiveness in software testing, it could be sometimes infeasible in practical work for a large scale software so that the mutation testing becomes time-consuming and even in prohibited time. Therefore, the number of faults assumed to exist in the software under test should be reduced so as to be able to confine the time complexity of test within a reasonable period of time. This paper utilizes the concept of fault dominance and equivalence, which has long been employed in hardware testing, for revealing a novel way of reducing the number of faults assumed to hide in software systems. Once the number of faults assumed in software is decreased sharply, the effectiveness of mutation testing will be greatly enhanced and become a feasible way of software testing. Examples and experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and the helpfulness of the technology proposed in the paper.