Compiler Testing: A Systematic Literature Analysis
This work provides a systematic analysis for researchers in compiler testing, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing literature without introducing new testing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of comprehensively characterizing compiler testing by proposing a literature analysis framework, which identified the USA as the leading country, 'random testing' as the most active keyword, and researchers with broad interests in small-scale collaborations.
Compilers are widely-used infrastructures in accelerating the software development, and expected to be trustworthy. In the literature, various testing technologies have been proposed to guarantee the quality of compilers. However, there remains an obstacle to comprehensively characterize and understand compiler testing. To overcome this obstacle, we propose a literature analysis framework to gain insights into the compiler testing area. First, we perform an extensive search to construct a dataset related to compiler testing papers. Then, we conduct a bibliometric analysis to analyze the productive authors, the influential papers, and the frequently tested compilers based on our dataset. Finally, we utilize association rules and collaboration networks to mine the authorships and the communities of interests among researchers and keywords. Some valuable results are reported. We find that the USA is the leading country that contains the most influential researchers and institutions. The most active keyword is "random testing". We also find that most researchers have broad interests within small-scale collaborators in the compiler testing area.