Empirical Assessment of Multimorphic Testing

International audienceThe performance of software systems (such as speed, memory usage, correct identification rate) tends to be an evermore important concern, often nowadays on par with functional correctness for critical systems.Systematically testing these performance concerns is however extremely difficult, in particular because there exists no theory underpinning the evaluation of a performance test suite, i.e., to tell the software developer whether such a test suite is "good enough" or even whether a test suite is better than another one. This paper proposes to apply Multimorphic testing and empirically assess the effectiveness of performance test suites of software systems coming from various domains. By analogy with mutation testing, our core idea is to leverage the typical configurability of these systems, and to check whether it makes any difference in the outcome of the tests: i.e., are some tests able to "kill" underperforming system configurations? More precisely, we propose a framework for defining and evaluating the coverage of a test suite with respect to a quantitative property of interest. Such properties can be the execution time, the memory usage or the success rate in tasks performed by a software system. This framework can be used to assess whether a new test case is worth adding to a test suite or to select an optimal test suite with respect to a property of interest. We evaluate several aspects of our proposal through 3 empirical studies carried out in different fields: object tracking in videos, object recognition in images, and code generators