How to write an effective “Response to Reviewers” letter
Jeff Offutt · Software Testing Verification and Reliability · 2016
This issue presents three new inventions in software testing. A major research topic in software engineering is that of fault localization, that is, finding faulty code in failing software. Probabilistic reasoning in diagnosing causes of program failures, by Junjie Xu, Rong Chen, and Zhenjun Du, invents a new graph to model possible faults probabilistically. (Recommended by Atif Memon.) The second paper, Behaviour abstraction adequacy criteria for API call protocol testing, by Hernan Czemerinski, Victor Braberman, and Sebastian Uchitel, invents new criteria to test whether APIs are used correctly. Specifically, the criteria measure the extent to which software that uses the APIs conforms to the expected protocol such as whether the methods are called in valid orders. (Recommended by Hasan Ural.) The third paper in this issue addresses the difficult oracle problem. Predicting metamorphic relations for testing scientific software: A machine learning approach using graph kernels, by Upulee Kanewala, James M. Bieman, and Asa Ben-Hur, invents a technique to use machine learning to predict metamorphic relations, which are used to create oracles in software for which correct behavior is unknown. (Recommended by TY Chen.)