UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents


      "Optimizing Compilation with Preservation of Structural
         Code Coverage Metrics to Support Software Testing"


                       Dr. Raimund Kirner
                  (School of Computer Science,
                 University of Hertfordshire, UK)


                   31 Octmber 2012  (Wednesday)
                            1 -2  pm


                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                      * * Room C152  * *

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available


Abstract:

Code-coverage-based testing is a widely-used testing strategy with the aim
of providing a meaningful decision criterion for the adequacy of a test
suite. Code-coverage-based testing is also mandated for the development of
safety-critical applications, for example, the DO178b document requires
the application of the modified condition/decision coverage (MCDC).
One critical issue of code-coverage testing is that structural code
coverage criteria are typically applied to source code while the generated
machine code may result in a different code structure due to code
optimisations performed by a compiler. In this talk we present the
automatic calculation of coverage profiles, and give a summary of the
results of the research project SECCO. Coverage profiles describe which
structural code-coverage criteria are preserved by which code
optimisation, independently of the concrete test suite. These coverage
profiles allow to easily extend compilers with the feature of preserving
any given code-coverage criteria by enabling only those code optimisations
that preserve it. Furthermore we describe the integration of these
coverage profile into the compiler GCC. With these coverage profiles we
answer the question of how much code optimisation is possible without
compromising the error-detection likelihood of a given test suite.
Experimental results conclude that the performance cost to achieve
preservation of structural code coverage in GCC is rather low.

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk