ICSE Most Influential Paper Award

The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is one of the two most prestigious software engineering conferences. At ICSE each year, the most impactful paper from ten years prior is selected by a jury and awarded to the paper that most shaped the field in the intervening decade. The citation for this paper reads:

"In their seminal ICSE 2014 paper “Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness”, Laura Inozemtseva and Reid Holmes give empirical evidence for why it might be wrong to pursue only a target metric to make inferences about the quality of testing.  The paper shows that coverage, which is often used as a proxy for bug detection capabilities of test suites, is actually misleading, and does not correlate for bugs found by a test suite.  The study challenges the traditional belief that higher code coverage directly translates to more effective test suites, and has lead to a shift in the testing area, by   encouraged the development of more comprehensive testing approaches that incorporate the behavior and characteristics of the software being tested, and balance coverage with other metrics.  The papers offers impactful insights not only in theory of software engineering but also its practice, since coverage is a commonly used target metric both in research and in industrial practice in software testing.”