TORACLE 2021 Workshop Summary

Abstract

Testing is an important activity in software engineering, especially with the growing adoption of software systems in safety-critical domains. Testing research, however, is mostly focused on deter- mining which test inputs to use (e.g., proposing and evaluating test coverage criteria or automatic test generation tools). Re- gardless of the used coverage criterion, we need to know whether a given program executes correctly on a given input. Indeed, a test execution for which we cannot discriminate between success or failure serves little purpose. This corresponds to the so-called øracle problem", the problem of knowing whether a program be- haves correctly for a speci c input. Although the importance of the oracle problem is well understood, only a few alternatives exist to manually deriving test oracles. This makes automated test or- acle generation one of the main bottlenecks for achieving full test automation. Therefore, novel approaches and tools are needed to address this important problem.