Abstract
In the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or modules, so it can be difficult to know whether the correct behaviour of the previous releases has been preserved in the new release. Most developers rely on a previously defined test suite to check this behaviour preservation. We propose here an alternative approach to automatically obtain a test suite that specifically focusses on comparing the old and new versions of the code. Our test case generation is directed by: a sophisticated combination of several already existing tools such as TypEr, CutEr, and PropEr; the choice of an expression of interest whose behaviour must be preserved; and the recording of the sequences of values this expression is evaluated to. All the presented work has been implemented in an open-source tool that is publicly available on GitHub.
This work has been partially supported by MINECO/AEI/FEDER (EU) under grant TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO-II/2015/013 (SmartLogic). Salvador Tamarit was partially supported by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte de la Generalitat Valenciana under grant APOSTD/2016/036.
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- 1.
While our current implementation limits the POI to variables, nothing prevents the technique from accepting any expression as the POI.
- 2.
We show the process for only one input function. In case the user defined more than one input function, the process described here would be repeated for each of them.
- 3.
Note that having ITCs that do not match with any function clause is not a problem. This scenario is common when TypEr returns the any type for some of the function’s parameters. However, these ITCs are useless since they will produce an empty trace. This explains our effort to avoid them.
- 4.
We could also send its actual value, i.e., 3. This is just a design decision, but we think that including the value that produced the mismatch could be more useful to find the source of a discrepancy.
- 5.
Function clauses need an additional transformation that consists in storing all the parameters inside a tuple so that they could be used in the case expressions introduced by these rules.
- 6.
In SecEr, a timeout is also used as a way to stop the test case generation.
- 7.
According to the definition of function tgen, the selection of the ITC that is going to be mutated is completely random. However, in our tool we give more priority to the inputs belonging to discrepancies(map) since they are more susceptible of revealing new discrepancies between versions.
- 8.
The format for this list is [FUN1/ARITY1, FUN2/ARITY2 ...]. If the user does not provide it, all functions exported by the module are used as input functions.
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Insa, D., Pérez, S., Silva, J., Tamarit, S. (2018). Erlang Code Evolution Control. In: Fioravanti, F., Gallagher, J. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10855. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94460-9_8
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