Validation of software testing experiments: A meta-analysis of icst 2013

Mark Hays, Jane Huffman Hayes, Arne C. Bathke

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Researchers in software testing are often faced with the following problem of empirical validation: does a new testing technique actually help analysts find more faults than some baseline method? Researchers evaluate their contribution using statistics to refute the null hypothesis that their technique is no better at finding faults than the state of the art. The decision as to which statistical methods are appropriate is best left to an expert statistician, but the reality is that software testing researchers often don't have this luxury. We developed an algorithm, Means Test, to help automate some aspects of statistical analysis. We implemented Means Test in the statistical software environment R, encouraging reuse and decreasing the need to write and test statistical analysis code. Our experiment showed that Means Test has significantly higher F-measures than several other common hypothesis tests. We applied Means Test to systematically validate the work presented at the 2013 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST'13). We found six papers that potentially misstated the significance of their results. Means Test provides a free and easy-to-use possibility for researchers to check whether their chosen statistical methods and the results obtained are plausible. It is available for download at coest.org.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - IEEE 7th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2014
Pages333-342
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event7th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2014 - Cleveland, OH, United States
Duration: Mar 31 2014Apr 4 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE 7th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2014

Conference

Conference7th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCleveland, OH
Period3/31/144/4/14

Keywords

  • empirical validation
  • software testing
  • statistical analysis

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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