Paper accepted at ASE 2019

The research paper titled, ''SEGATE: Unveiling Semantic Inconsistencies between Code and Specification of String Inputs", authored by Devika Sondhi (PhD student, IIIT-Delhi) and Dr. Rahul Purandare (Faculty, IIIT-Delhi) has been accepted at the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2019), to be held in San Diego, United States in November, 2019.

Automated testing techniques may often miss the gap between functional specification and code implementation. This gap may be subtle in nature, arising due to the absence of logical checks, either in the implementation or in the specification, resulting in inconsistencies in the input definition. The paper proposes a test generation technique for structured string inputs to infer inconsistencies in input definition to expose semantic gaps in the method under test and the method specification. The authors assess this technique using their tool SEGATE, Semantic Gap Tester. SEGATE uses static analysis and automaton modelling to infer the gap and generate test cases. On a benchmark dataset, comprising of defects reported in 15 popular open-source libraries, written in Java, SEGATE was able to generate tests to expose 80% of the defects.