arXiv subjects

Chang-ai Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Chang-ai Sun.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Bridge: Automatically Mining Ecosystem-Scale API Update Mappings and Client Update Instances

Library updates often require adapting client code to API changes. API update mappings that identify relations between legacy and replacement APIs, version transitions that these mappings apply, and client update instances that capture concrete API call changes are essential for developing and evaluating automated library update techniques. Existing library evolution datasets capture only subsets of this information and typically cover few third-party libraries. In this paper, we present Bridge, a client-driven framework for automatically constructing ecosystem-scale library update datasets that connect API update mappings, version transitions, and client update instances. Bridge first mines candidate update instances from client dependency update commits at scale, validates them using library-side evidence, and then derives API update mappings from validated instances. This design grounds each retained mapping in at least one client update instance. On a manually annotated ground truth dataset, Bridge achieves 91.6% precision and 88.7% recall for Java and 90.1% precision and 64.0% recall for Python. Applied to WoC V3, Bridge mines 381,661 Java and 277,259 Python client update instances, representing 18,900 and 4,456 API update mappings across 2,557 and 999 libraries, respectively. The mined mappings exhibit a pronounced long-tail distribution, with most appearing in only a few client update instances. As one application of the dataset, we evaluate four large language models on replacement API recommendation, a key step in library updates. The best recommendation accuracy reaches only 37.1% for Java and 44.4% for Python, and all evaluated models perform substantially better on frequently observed mappings than on mappings observed in only a few client update instances, highlighting the difficulty current LLMs face in recommending replacements for mappings in the long tail.

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arXiv2026

Understanding Bugs in Template Engine-Based Applications: Symptoms, Root Causes, and Fix Patterns

Template engines are indispensable components in modern software ecosystems, enabling the generation of structured documents and scripts across domains such as web development, Infrastructure as Code, and data engineering. However, the unique architectural characteristics of template engine-based applications (i.e., TE applications), including multi-language composition, opaque data flow, deferred validation, and complex integration, pose significant challenges for diagnosing and resolving bugs in TE applications. While prior research has primarily focused on template engine security, bugs in TE applications remain under-investigated. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive study of TE application bugs. By analyzing 1,004 application bugs across 15 template engines in five programming languages, we identify the symptoms and root causes of TE application bugs and common patterns to fix them. Our findings reveal that Abnormal Rendering Result (e.g., unexpected or blank output) is the most prevalent symptom (48.61%), often manifesting as silent failures that are difficult to diagnose. We identify 17 root causes, with Syntax Misuse, Mismatched Data Context, and Incompatible Integration as the dominant categories. Furthermore, we find that while 67.92% of the bugs are fixed within the template, over 20% require modifications in the host-side logic to resolve data context issues. Based on these findings, we derive actionable implications for tool designers, practitioners, and researchers. To demonstrate the practical utility of our findings, we further develop two prototype tools for the Jinja engine to facilitate the development and debugging of TE applications.

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arXiv2024

Test Adequacy for Metamorphic Testing: Criteria, Measurement, and Implication

Metamorphic testing (MT) is a simple yet effective technique to alleviate the oracle problem in software testing. The underlying idea of MT is to test a software system by checking whether metamorphic relations (MRs) hold among multiple test inputs (including source and follow-up inputs) and the actual output of their executions. Since MRs and source inputs are two essential components of MT, considerable efforts have been made to examine the systematic identification of MRs and the effective generation of source inputs, which has greatly enriched the fundamental theory of MT since its invention. However, few studies have investigated the test adequacy assessment issue of MT, which hinders the objective measurement of MT's test quality as well as the effective construction of test suites. Although in the context of traditional software testing, there exist a number of test adequacy criteria that specify testing requirements to constitute an adequate test from various perspectives, they are not in line with MT's focus which is to test the software under testing (SUT) from the perspective of necessary properties. In this paper, we proposed a new set of criteria that specifies testing requirements from the perspective of necessary properties satisfied by the SUT, and designed a test adequacy measurement that evaluates the degree of adequacy based on both MRs and source inputs. The experimental results have shown that the proposed measurement can effectively indicate the fault detection effectiveness of test suites, i.e., test suites with increased test adequacy usually exhibit higher effectiveness in fault detection. Our work made an attempt to assess the test adequacy of MT from a new perspective, and our criteria and measurement provide a new approach to evaluate the test quality of MT and provide guidelines for constructing effective test suites of MT.

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arXiv2022

Test suite effectiveness metric evaluation: what do we know and what should we do?

Comparing test suite effectiveness metrics has always been a research hotspot. However, prior studies have different conclusions or even contradict each other for comparing different test suite effectiveness metrics. The problem we found most troubling to our community is that researchers tend to oversimplify the description of the ground truth they use. For example, a common expression is that "we studied the correlation between real faults and the metric to evaluate (MTE)". However, the meaning of "real faults" is not clear-cut. As a result, there is a need to scrutinize the meaning of "real faults". Without this, it will be half-knowledgeable with the conclusions. To tackle this challenge, we propose a framework ASSENT (evAluating teSt Suite EffectiveNess meTrics) to guide the follow-up research. In nature, ASSENT consists of three fundamental components: ground truth, benchmark test suites, and agreement indicator. First, materialize the ground truth for determining the real order in effectiveness among test suites. Second, generate a set of benchmark test suites and derive their ground truth order in effectiveness. Third, for the benchmark test suites, generate the MTE order in effectiveness by the metric to evaluate (MTE). Finally, calculate the agreement indicator between the two orders. Under ASSENT, we are able to compare the accuracy of different test suite effectiveness metrics. We apply ASSENT to evaluate representative test suite effectiveness metrics, including mutation score metrics and code coverage metrics. Our results show that, based on the real faults, mutation score and subsuming mutation score are the best metrics to quantify test suite effectiveness. Meanwhile, by using mutants instead of real faults, MTEs will be overestimated by more than 20% in values.

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