Generación de Casos de Prueba en Programación Orientada a Objetos = Test Case Generation in Object-Oriented Programming

Las pruebas de software (Testing) son en la actualidad la técnica más utilizada para la validación y la evaluación de la calidad de un programa. El testing está integrado en todas las metodologías prácticas de desarrollo de software y juega un papel crucial en el éxito de cualquier proyecto de software. Desde las unidades de código más pequeñas a los componentes más complejos, su integración en un sistema de software y su despliegue a producción, todas las piezas de un producto de software deben ser probadas a fondo antes de que el producto de software pueda ser liberado a un entorno de producción. La mayor limitación del testing de software es que continúa siendo un conjunto de tareas manuales, representando una buena parte del coste total de desarrollo. En este escenario, la automatización resulta fundamental para aliviar estos altos costes. La generación automática de casos de pruebas (TCG, del inglés test case generation) es el proceso de generar automáticamente casos de prueba que logren un alto recubrimiento del programa. Entre la gran variedad de enfoques hacia la TCG, esta tesis se centra en un enfoque estructural de caja blanca, y más concretamente en una de las técnicas más utilizadas actualmente, la ejecución simbólica. En ejecución simbólica, el programa bajo pruebas es ejecutado con expresiones simbólicas como argumentos de entrada en lugar de valores concretos. Esta tesis se basa en un marco general para la generación automática de casos de prueba dirigido a programas imperativos orientados a objetos (Java, por ejemplo) y basado en programación lógica con restricciones (CLP, del inglés constraint logic programming). En este marco general, el programa imperativo bajo pruebas es primeramente traducido a un programa CLP equivalente, y luego dicho programa CLP es ejecutado simbólicamente utilizando los mecanismos de evaluación estándar de CLP, extendidos con operaciones especiales para el tratamiento de estructuras de datos dinámicas. Mejorar la escalabilidad y la eficiencia de la ejecución simbólica constituye un reto muy importante. Es bien sabido que la ejecución simbólica resulta impracticable debido al gran número de caminos de ejecución que deben ser explorados y a tamaño de las restricciones que se deben manipular. Además, la generación de casos de prueba mediante ejecución simbólica tiende a producir un número innecesariamente grande de casos de prueba cuando es aplicada a programas de tamaño medio o grande. Las contribuciones de esta tesis pueden ser resumidas como sigue. (1) Se desarrolla un enfoque composicional basado en CLP para la generación de casos de prueba, el cual busca aliviar el problema de la explosión de caminos interprocedimiento analizando de forma separada cada componente (p.ej. método) del programa bajo pruebas, almacenando los resultados y reutilizándolos incrementalmente hasta obtener resultados para el programa completo. También se ha desarrollado un enfoque composicional basado en especialización de programas (evaluación parcial) para la herramienta de ejecución simbólica Symbolic PathFinder (SPF). (2) Se propone una metodología para usar información del consumo de recursos del programa bajo pruebas para guiar la ejecución simbólica hacia aquellas partes del programa que satisfacen una determinada política de recursos, evitando la exploración de aquellas partes del programa que violan dicha política. (3) Se propone una metodología genérica para guiar la ejecución simbólica hacia las partes más interesantes del programa, la cual utiliza abstracciones como generadores de trazas para guiar la ejecución de acuerdo a criterios de selección estructurales. (4) Se propone un nuevo resolutor de restricciones, el cual maneja eficientemente restricciones sobre el uso de la memoria dinámica global (heap) durante ejecución simbólica, el cual mejora considerablemente el rendimiento de la técnica estándar utilizada para este propósito, la \lazy initialization". (5) Todas las técnicas propuestas han sido implementadas en el sistema PET (el enfoque composicional ha sido también implementado en la herramienta SPF). Mediante evaluación experimental se ha confirmado que todas ellas mejoran considerablemente la escalabilidad y eficiencia de la ejecución simbólica y la generación de casos de prueba. ABSTRACT Testing is nowadays the most used technique to validate software and assess its quality. It is integrated into all practical software development methodologies and plays a crucial role towards the success of any software project. From the smallest units of code to the most complex components and their integration into a software system and later deployment; all pieces of a software product must be tested thoroughly before a software product can be released. The main limitation of software testing is that it remains a mostly manual task, representing a large fraction of the total development cost. In this scenario, test automation is paramount to alleviate such high costs. Test case generation (TCG) is the process of automatically generating test inputs that achieve high coverage of the system under test. Among a wide variety of approaches to TCG, this thesis focuses on structural (white-box) TCG, where one of the most successful enabling techniques is symbolic execution. In symbolic execution, the program under test is executed with its input arguments being symbolic expressions rather than concrete values. This thesis relies on a previously developed constraint-based TCG framework for imperative object-oriented programs (e.g., Java), in which the imperative program under test is first translated into an equivalent constraint logic program, and then such translated program is symbolically executed by relying on standard evaluation mechanisms of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), extended with special treatment for dynamically allocated data structures. Improving the scalability and efficiency of symbolic execution constitutes a major challenge. It is well known that symbolic execution quickly becomes impractical due to the large number of paths that must be explored and the size of the constraints that must be handled. Moreover, symbolic execution-based TCG tends to produce an unnecessarily large number of test cases when applied to medium or large programs. The contributions of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. (1) A compositional approach to CLP-based TCG is developed which overcomes the inter-procedural path explosion by separately analyzing each component (method) in a program under test, stowing the results as method summaries and incrementally reusing them to obtain whole-program results. A similar compositional strategy that relies on program specialization is also developed for the state-of-the-art symbolic execution tool Symbolic PathFinder (SPF). (2) Resource-driven TCG is proposed as a methodology to use resource consumption information to drive symbolic execution towards those parts of the program under test that comply with a user-provided resource policy, avoiding the exploration of those parts of the program that violate such policy. (3) A generic methodology to guide symbolic execution towards the most interesting parts of a program is proposed, which uses abstractions as oracles to steer symbolic execution through those parts of the program under test that interest the programmer/tester most. (4) A new heap-constraint solver is proposed, which efficiently handles heap-related constraints and aliasing of references during symbolic execution and greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art standard technique known as lazy initialization. (5) All techniques above have been implemented in the PET system (and some of them in the SPF tool). Experimental evaluation has confirmed that they considerably help towards a more scalable and efficient symbolic execution and TCG.

Power, privilege and HIV prevalence: examination of sexual HIV-risk factors in MSM and transgender women who engage in transactional sex

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

"Vender as carnes": prostituição no litoral norte paraibano

This thesis aims to contribute to reflections on female prostitution in the Paraíba`s North Coast in specific regions of the Baía da Traição and Indian villages Potiguara constant cultural flow region between indigenous and non-indigenous. Within this hemisphere intend to analyze the transits, the body boundaries, sexuality, identity and ethnic category as central to understanding of prostitution practices inaugurate the possibility to study the gender and blurred places, border, mixed. Specifically, I discuss the experience of articulated gender border between urban and rural, indigenous and non-indigenous, to show and hide, visible and not visible. Analyze the social relations among women who prostitute themselves and the community they inhabit, mobility, economic and symbolic exchanges, conflicts and situations of violence, since the social environment is permeated by these dimensions and the way these women includes complex situations and individuals. Analyze the ethnic and flow of people and relationships that are built differently inside and outside the indigenous community, such as women who prostitute themselves build their indigenous and prostitutes identities. Analyze this mobility in prostitution relationships and the reason for this mobility, indigenous women prostitutes avoid this practice in the indigenous area in order to protect their identities because the community is small, there is the fear on the probability of gossip and malaise in the community. However, the region is characterized as a heterogeneous whole, requiring a procedural analysis to cover the whole specificity of these practices in the covered area.

"Vender as carnes": prostituição no litoral norte paraibano

This thesis aims to contribute to reflections on female prostitution in the Paraíba`s North Coast in specific regions of the Baía da Traição and Indian villages Potiguara constant cultural flow region between indigenous and non-indigenous. Within this hemisphere intend to analyze the transits, the body boundaries, sexuality, identity and ethnic category as central to understanding of prostitution practices inaugurate the possibility to study the gender and blurred places, border, mixed. Specifically, I discuss the experience of articulated gender border between urban and rural, indigenous and non-indigenous, to show and hide, visible and not visible. Analyze the social relations among women who prostitute themselves and the community they inhabit, mobility, economic and symbolic exchanges, conflicts and situations of violence, since the social environment is permeated by these dimensions and the way these women includes complex situations and individuals. Analyze the ethnic and flow of people and relationships that are built differently inside and outside the indigenous community, such as women who prostitute themselves build their indigenous and prostitutes identities. Analyze this mobility in prostitution relationships and the reason for this mobility, indigenous women prostitutes avoid this practice in the indigenous area in order to protect their identities because the community is small, there is the fear on the probability of gossip and malaise in the community. However, the region is characterized as a heterogeneous whole, requiring a procedural analysis to cover the whole specificity of these practices in the covered area.

Construção e validação do instrumento de investigação do conhecimento de gestantes sobre sua saúde bucal e a do seu bebê: perspectiva do cuidado em saúde

INTRODUCTION: Humanized and quality prenatal and post-partum care is critical to maternal and newborn health, as well as oral health care. Currently, the National Oral Health Policy is aiming at expanding dental care for pregnant women. Thus, the promotion of oral health and attention to prenatal care policies should be integrated; however, there is still limited participation of pregnant women. Thus, it is necessary to verify the knowledge of pregnant women related to oral health, seeking to estimate the quality of dental care provided during prenatal care, being essential for the Family Health strategy to organize personnel, plan costs and to ensure the quality standard of care. OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a research instrument on the knowledge of pregnant women about their oral health and of their baby. METHOD: This is a construction and validation study with 93 pregnant women in Family Health Units and specialized private clinics in Obstetrics, in the city of Natal / RN. It was authorized by the Onofre Lopes University Hospital Ethics Committee of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) under the registration number 421.163/13. The construction of the instrument followed steps so that it was valid, reliable and sensitive: creation and reduction of the items (drafting of the instrument), content validity and testing of the instrument, and hypotheses validation. Once constructed, the instrument was evaluated by experts who suggested modifications. There was consultation with the target population about the new version of the created instrument, which had the instrument validation verified by internal consistency through intra and inter-calibration and test-retest. Next, the hypotheses were validated. A database was built in the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), version 22.0. After creating the hypotheses, an association was found for validating the criteria between each of the specific issues for each established criteria, considering a 5% significance level. Data analysis was carried out by describing the absolute and relative frequencies of the variables pertaining to issues relating to their pregnancy knowledge about their oral health and their baby. The Kappa coefficient was used for the calibration process (Inter and Intra-examiner calibration) and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to analyze instrument reproducibility (test-retest). In addition, the chi-square test was used to cross the dependent variable with the (dichotomized) independent variables. RESULTS: The intra and inter agreement analysis presented a Kappa coefficient between 0.400 and 1.000. Internal consistency through the analysis showed that 90% of the instrument's questions showed great reliability in the answers (Cronbach α ˃ 0.7). In the investigation of the relationship between the dependent variable (knowledge about oral health) and the independent variables (trimester of pregnancy, education, income and multiparous), it was found that none of these independent variables were significantly associated. All hypotheses had their Ho confirmed. CONCLUSION: The constructed instrument was validated, considering that it showed to be sensitive with good reliability and good accuracy, and therefore can be used to assess pregnant women’s knowledge about their oral health and the oral health of their baby.

Construção e validação do instrumento de investigação do conhecimento de gestantes sobre sua saúde bucal e a do seu bebê: perspectiva do cuidado em saúde

INTRODUCTION: Humanized and quality prenatal and post-partum care is critical to maternal and newborn health, as well as oral health care. Currently, the National Oral Health Policy is aiming at expanding dental care for pregnant women. Thus, the promotion of oral health and attention to prenatal care policies should be integrated; however, there is still limited participation of pregnant women. Thus, it is necessary to verify the knowledge of pregnant women related to oral health, seeking to estimate the quality of dental care provided during prenatal care, being essential for the Family Health strategy to organize personnel, plan costs and to ensure the quality standard of care. OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a research instrument on the knowledge of pregnant women about their oral health and of their baby. METHOD: This is a construction and validation study with 93 pregnant women in Family Health Units and specialized private clinics in Obstetrics, in the city of Natal / RN. It was authorized by the Onofre Lopes University Hospital Ethics Committee of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) under the registration number 421.163/13. The construction of the instrument followed steps so that it was valid, reliable and sensitive: creation and reduction of the items (drafting of the instrument), content validity and testing of the instrument, and hypotheses validation. Once constructed, the instrument was evaluated by experts who suggested modifications. There was consultation with the target population about the new version of the created instrument, which had the instrument validation verified by internal consistency through intra and inter-calibration and test-retest. Next, the hypotheses were validated. A database was built in the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), version 22.0. After creating the hypotheses, an association was found for validating the criteria between each of the specific issues for each established criteria, considering a 5% significance level. Data analysis was carried out by describing the absolute and relative frequencies of the variables pertaining to issues relating to their pregnancy knowledge about their oral health and their baby. The Kappa coefficient was used for the calibration process (Inter and Intra-examiner calibration) and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to analyze instrument reproducibility (test-retest). In addition, the chi-square test was used to cross the dependent variable with the (dichotomized) independent variables. RESULTS: The intra and inter agreement analysis presented a Kappa coefficient between 0.400 and 1.000. Internal consistency through the analysis showed that 90% of the instrument's questions showed great reliability in the answers (Cronbach α ˃ 0.7). In the investigation of the relationship between the dependent variable (knowledge about oral health) and the independent variables (trimester of pregnancy, education, income and multiparous), it was found that none of these independent variables were significantly associated. All hypotheses had their Ho confirmed. CONCLUSION: The constructed instrument was validated, considering that it showed to be sensitive with good reliability and good accuracy, and therefore can be used to assess pregnant women’s knowledge about their oral health and the oral health of their baby.

A systematic review with procedural assessments and meta-analysis of Low Level Laser Therapy in lateral elbow tendinopathy (tennis elbow)

Background: Recent reviews have indicated that low level level laser therapy (LLLT) is ineffective in lateral elbow tendinopathy (LET) without assessing validity of treatment procedures and doses or the influence of prior steroid injections. Methods: Systematic review with meta-analysis, with primary outcome measures of pain relief and/or global improvement and subgroup analyses of methodological quality, wavelengths and treatment procedures. Results: 18 randomised placebo-controlled trials (RCTs) were identified with 13 RCTs (730 patients) meeting the criteria for meta-analysis. 12 RCTs satisfied half or more of the methodological criteria. Publication bias was detected by Egger's graphical test, which showed a negative direction of bias. Ten of the trials included patients with poor prognosis caused by failed steroid injections or other treatment failures, or long symptom duration or severe baseline pain. The weighted mean difference (WMD) for pain relief was 10.2 mm [95% CI: 3.0 to 17.5] and the RR for global improvement was 1.36 [1.16 to 1.60]. Trials which targeted acupuncture points reported negative results, as did trials with wavelengths 820, 830 and 1064 nm. In a subgroup of five trials with 904 nm lasers and one trial with 632 nm wavelength where the lateral elbow tendon insertions were directly irradiated, WMD for pain relief was 17.2 mm [95% CI: 8.5 to 25.9] and 14.0 mm [95% CI: 7.4 to 20.6] respectively, while RR for global pain improvement was only reported for 904 nm at 1.53 [95% CI: 1.28 to 1.83]. LLLT doses in this subgroup ranged between 0.5 and 7.2 Joules. Secondary outcome measures of painfree grip strength, pain pressure threshold, sick leave and follow-up data from 3 to 8 weeks after the end of treatment, showed consistently significant results in favour of the same LLLT subgroup (p < 0.02). No serious side-effects were reported. Conclusion: LLLT administered with optimal doses of 904 nm and possibly 632 nm wavelengths directly to the lateral elbow tendon insertions, seem to offer short-term pain relief and less disability in LET, both alone and in conjunction with an exercise regimen. This finding contradicts the conclusions of previous reviews which failed to assess treatment procedures, wavelengths and optimal doses.

Timing analysis of an inter-cell mobility procedure for a wired/wireless PROFIBUS network

Recently, there have been a few research efforts towards extending the capabilities of fieldbus networks to encompass wireless support. In previous works we have proposed a hybrid wired/wireless PROFIBUS network solution where the interconnection between the heterogeneous communication media was accomplished through bridge-like interconnecting devices. The resulting networking architecture embraced a Multiple Logical Ring (MLR) approach, thus with multiple independent tokens, where the communication between different domains was supported by the Inter-Domain Protocol (IDP). The proposed architecture also supports mobility of stations between different wireless cells. To that hybrid wired/wireless networking architecture we have proposed a worst-case response timing analysis of the IDP, without considering inter-cell mobility (or handoff) of stations. In this paper, we advance that previous work by proposing a worst-case timing analysis of the mobility procedure.

A framework for the response time analysis of fixed-priority tasks with stochastic inter-arrival times

Real-time scheduling usually considers worst-case values for the parameters of task (or message stream) sets, in order to provide safe schedulability tests for hard real-time systems. However, worst-case conditions introduce a level of pessimism that is often inadequate for a certain class of (soft) real-time systems. In this paper we provide an approach for computing the stochastic response time of tasks where tasks have inter-arrival times described by discrete probabilistic distribution functions, instead of minimum inter-arrival (MIT) values.

The Growth in Inter-connectedness in the Scottish Economy, 1998-2007; a disaggregated analysis

The measurement of inter-connectedness in an economy using input-output tables is not new, however much of the previous literature has not had any explicit dynamic dimension. Studies have tried to estimate the degree of inter-relatedness for an economy at a given point in time using one input-output table, some have compared different economies at a point in time but few have looked at the question of how interconnectedness within an economy changes over time. The publication in 2010 of a consistent series of input-output tables for Scotland offers the researcher the opportunity to track changes in the degree of inter-connectedness over the seven year period 1998 to 2007. The paper is in two parts. A simple measure of inter-connectedness is introduced in the first part of the paper and applied to the Scottish tables. In the second part of the paper an extraction method is applied to sector by sector to the tables in order to estimate how interconnectedness has changed over time for each industrial sector.

The Growth in Inter-connectedness in the Scottish Economy 1998-2007; a disaggregated analysis.

The measurement of inter-connectedness in an economy using input-output tables is not new, however much of the previous literature has not had any explicit dynamic dimension. Studies have tried to estimate the degree of inter-relatedness for an economy at a given point in time using one input-output table, some have compared different economies at a point in time but few have looked at the question of how interconnectedness within an economy changes over time. The publication in 2010 of a consistent series of input-output tables for Scotland offers the researcher the opportunity to track changes in the degree of inter-connectedness over the seven year period 1998 to 2007. The paper is in two parts. A simple measure of inter-connectedness is introduced in the first part of the paper and applied to the Scottish tables. In the second part of the paper an extraction method is applied to sector by sector to the tables in order to estimate how interconnectedness has changed over time for each industrial sector.

Multilocus sequence analysis reveals the genetic diversity of European fruit tree phytoplasmas and supports the existence of inter-species recombination

The genetic diversity of three temperate fruit tree phytoplasmas ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma prunorum’, ‘Ca. P. mali’ and ‘Ca. P. pyri’ has been established by multilocus sequence analysis. Among the four genetic loci used, the genes imp and aceF distinguished 30 and 24 genotypes, respectively, and showed the highest variability. Percentage of substitution for imp ranged from 50 to 68% according to species. Percentage of substitution varied between 9 and 12% for aceF, whereas it was between 5 and 6% for pnp and secY. In the case of ‘Ca P. prunorum’ the three most prevalent aceF genotypes were detected in both plants and insect vectors, confirming that the prevalent isolates are propagated by insects. The four isolates known to be hypo-virulent had the same aceF sequence, indicating a possible monophyletic origin. Haplotype network reconstructed by eBURST revealed that among the 34 haplotypes of ‘Ca. P. prunorum’, the four hypo-virulent isolates also grouped together in the same clade. Genotyping of some Spanish and Azerbaijanese ‘Ca. P. pyri’ isolates showed that they shared some alleles with ‘Ca. P. prunorum’, supporting for the first time to our knowledge, the existence of inter-species recombination between these two species.

Cognitive issues in fingerprint analysis: Inter- and intra-expert consistency and the effect of a "target" comparison

Deciding whether two fingerprint marks originate from the same source requires examination and comparison of their features. Many cognitive factors play a major role in such information processing. In this paper we examined the consistency (both between- and within-experts) in the analysis of latent marks, and whether the presence of a 'target' comparison print affects this analysis. Our findings showed that the context of a comparison print affected analysis of the latent mark, possibly influencing allocation of attention, visual search, and threshold for determining a 'signal'. We also found that even without the context of the comparison print there was still a lack of consistency in analysing latent marks. Not only was this reflected by inconsistency between different experts, but the same experts at different times were inconsistent with their own analysis. However, the characterization of these inconsistencies depends on the standard and definition of what constitutes inconsistent. Furthermore, these effects were not uniform; the lack of consistency varied across fingerprints and experts. We propose solutions to mediate variability in the analysis of friction ridge skin.

Cognitive Issues in Fingerprint Analysis: Inter- and Intra-Expert Consistency and the Effect of a "Target" Comparison

Deciding whether two fingerprint marks originate from the same source requires examination and comparison of their features. Many cognitive factors play a major role in such information processing. In this paper we examined the consistency (both between- and within-experts) in the analysis of latent marks, and whether the presence of a 'target' comparison print affects this analysis. Our findings showed that the context of a comparison print affected analysis of the latent mark, possibly influencing allocation of attention, visual search, and threshold for determining a 'signal'. We also found that even without the context of the comparison print there was still a lack of consistency in analysing latent marks. Not only was this reflected by inconsistency between different experts, but the same experts at different times were inconsistent with their own analysis. However, the characterization of these inconsistencies depends on the standard and definition of what constitutes inconsistent. Furthermore, these effects were not uniform; the lack of consistency varied across fingerprints and experts. We propose solutions to mediate variability in the analysis of friction ridge skin.