The Impact of List Reduction for Language Agnostic Test Case Reducers

Heineken T, Philippsen M (2025)


Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Original article

Publication year: 2025

Event location: Naples IT

Abstract

To find and fix bugs in compilers or in other code processing tools,
modern language agnostic test case reducers boil the input files down
to small bug-triggering versions. To do so they carefully craft lists
of potentially irrelevant items and apply a list reduction to minimize
them.
 
 
We show that substituting the chosen list reduction algorithm improves
the overall reducer runtime without affecting the final file sizes
much. In a comparative study we combine 6 renowned test case reducers
with 7 established list reductions. Most renowned reducers become
faster by switching to another list reduction. We also present three
ways to preprocess the crafted lists before the test case reducers
pass them to the list reductions. We discuss the conditions for the
preprocessings to improve the reducers' speeds even more.
 
On a benchmark of 321 C and SMT-LIB2 compiler bugs,
selecting a different list reduction saves up to 74.7% of the runtime.
Most test case reducers benefit from such a substitution.
Preprocessing saves up to 9.1 additional percentage points.
Combining these ideas saves up to 75.2% of the runtime.

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How to cite

APA:

Heineken, T., & Philippsen, M. (2025). The Impact of List Reduction for Language Agnostic Test Case Reducers. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST). Naples, IT.

MLA:

Heineken, Tobias, and Michael Philippsen. "The Impact of List Reduction for Language Agnostic Test Case Reducers." Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), Naples 2025.

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