@inproceedings{5ad337f59b1e470fa1b6198847d4bab1,
title = "Distinguished paper: The effect of program and model structure on MC/DC test adequacy coverage",
abstract = "In avionics and other critical systems domains, adequacy of test suites is currently measured using the MC/DC metric on source code (or on a model in model-based development). We believe that the rigor of the MC/DC metric is highly sensitive to the structure of the implementation and can therefore be misleading as a test adequacy criterion. We investigate this hypothesis by empirically studying the effect of program structure on MC/DC coverage. To perform this investigation, we use six realistic systems from the civil avionics domain and two toy examples. For each of these systems, we use two versions of their implementation-with and without expression folding (i.e., miming). To assess the sensitivity of MC/DC to program structure, we first generate test suites that satisfy MC/DC over a non-inlined implementation. We then run the generated test suites over the inlined implementation and measure MC/DC achieved. For our realistic examples, the test suites yield an average reduction of 29.5% in MC/DC achieved over the inlined implementations at 5% statistical significance level.",
keywords = "Experimentation, Verification",
author = "Ajitha Rajan and Whalen, {Michael W} and Mats Heimdahl",
year = "2008",
doi = "10.1145/1368088.1368111",
language = "English (US)",
isbn = "9781605580791",
series = "Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering",
pages = "161--170",
booktitle = "ICSE'08",
note = "30th International Conference on Software Engineering 2008, ICSE'08 ; Conference date: 10-05-2008 Through 18-05-2008",
}