Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

11-2017

Abstract

Measuring quality of test suites is one of the major challenges of software testing. Code coverage identifies tested and untested parts of code and is frequently used to approximate test suite quality. Multiple previous studies have investigated the relationship between coverage ratio and test suite quality, without a clear consent in the results. In this work we study whether covered code contains a smaller number of future bugs than uncovered code (assuming appropriate scaling). If this correlation holds and bug density is lower in covered code, coverage can be regarded as a meaningful metric to estimate the adequacy of testing. To this end we analyse 16000 internal bug reports and bug-fixes of SAP HANA, a large industrial software project. We found that the above-mentioned relationship indeed holds, and is statistically significant. Contrary to most previous works our study uses real bugs and real bug-fixes. Furthermore, our data is derived from a complex and large industrial project.

Keywords

software quality, coverage, bug density, large real world project, industry project, empirical research

Discipline

Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

ESEM 2017: Proceedings of 11th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement: Toronto, Canada, November 9-10

First Page

307

Last Page

313

ISBN

9781509040391

Identifier

10.1109/ESEM.2017.44

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ESEM.2017.44

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