University of Waterloo

About: University of Waterloo is a education organization based out in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 36093 authors who have published 93906 publications receiving 2948139 citations. The organization is also known as: UW & uwaterloo.

Are mutants a valid substitute for real faults in software testing

Abstract: A good test suite is one that detects real faults Because the set of faults in a program is usually unknowable, this definition is not useful to practitioners who are creating test suites, nor to researchers who are creating and evaluating tools that generate test suites In place of real faults, testing research often uses mutants, which are artificial faults -- each one a simple syntactic variation -- that are systematically seeded throughout the program under test Mutation analysis is appealing because large numbers of mutants can be automatically-generated and used to compensate for low quantities or the absence of known real faults Unfortunately, there is little experimental evidence to support the use of mutants as a replacement for real faults This paper investigates whether mutants are indeed a valid substitute for real faults, ie, whether a test suite’s ability to detect mutants is correlated with its ability to detect real faults that developers have fixed Unlike prior studies, these investigations also explicitly consider the conflating effects of code coverage on the mutant detection rate Our experiments used 357 real faults in 5 open-source applications that comprise a total of 321,000 lines of code Furthermore, our experiments used both developer-written and automatically-generated test suites The results show a statistically significant correlation between mutant detection and real fault detection, independently of code coverage The results also give concrete suggestions on how to improve mutation analysis and reveal some inherent limitations

Intracluster Medium Entropy Profiles for a Chandra Archival Sample of Galaxy Clusters

Abstract: We present radial entropy profiles of the intracluster medium (ICM) for a collection of 239 clusters taken from the Chandra X-ray Observatory's Data Archive. Entropy is of great interest because it controls ICM global properties and records the thermal history of a cluster. Entropy is therefore a useful quantity for studying the effects of feedback on the cluster environment and investigating any breakdown of cluster self-similarity. We find that most ICM entropy profiles are well fitted by a model which is a power law at large radii and approaches a constant value at small radii: K(r) = K {sub 0} + K {sub 100}(r/100 kpc){sup {alpha}}, where K {sub 0} quantifies the typical excess of core entropy above the best-fitting power law found at larger radii. We also show that the K {sub 0} distributions of both the full archival sample and the primary Highest X-Ray Flux Galaxy Cluster Sample of Reiprich (2001) are bimodal with a distinct gap between K {sub 0} {approx} 30-50 keV cm{sup 2} and population peaks at K {sub 0} {approx} 15 keV cm{sup 2} and K {sub 0} {approx} 150 keV cm{sup 2}. The effects of point-spread function smearing and angular resolution on best-fitmore » K {sub 0} values are investigated using mock Chandra observations and degraded entropy profiles, respectively. We find that neither of these effects is sufficient to explain the entropy-profile flattening we measure at small radii. The influence of profile curvature and number of radial bins on best-fit K {sub 0} is also considered, and we find no indication that K {sub 0} is significantly impacted by either. For completeness, we include previously unpublished optical spectroscopy of H{alpha} and [N II] emission lines discussed in Cavagnolo et al. (2008a). All data and results associated with this work are publicly available via the project Web site.« less

Sorption nonideality during organic contaminant transport in porous media

Abstract: In modeling subsurface contaminant transport, sorption is often simplified by assuming instantaneous equilibrium, isotherm linearity, and sorption‐desorption singularity. Data exhibiting behavior that deviates from that predicted by this simple model have been reported, challenging the validity of these assumptions. This nonideal sorptive behavior has been attributed to several different factors, including kinetic sorption reactions, diffusive mass transfer resistances, isotherm nonlinearity, and sorption‐desorption nonsingularity. These factors are examined and their relative impact on contaminant transport is evaluated. For hydrophobic organic compounds, physical nonequilibrium (i.e., rate‐limited mass‐transfer in aggregated or layered systems) and intraorganic matter diffusion (rate‐limited diffusion within the sorbent organic matter matrix) are probably the predominant factors causing nonideality. The relative importance of these factors is scale‐dependent. For smaller scale systems, mass‐transfer lim...