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Search-based test data generation methods mostly consider the branch coverage criterion. To the best of our knowledge, only two works exist which propose a fitness function that can support the prime path coverage criterion, while this criterion subsumes the branch coverage criterion. These works are based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA) while scalability of the evolutionary algorithms like GA is questionable. Since there is a general agreement that evolutionary algorithms are inferior to swarm intelligence algorithms, we propose a new approach based on swarm intelligence for covering prime paths. We utilize two prominent swarm intelligence algorithms, i.e., ACO and PSO, along with a new normalized fitness function to provide a better approach for covering prime paths. To make ACO applicable for the test data generation problem, we provide a customization of this algorithm. The experimental results show that PSO and the proposed customization of ACO are both more efficient and more effective than GA when generating test data to cover prime paths. Also, the customized ACO, in comparison to PSO, has better effectiveness while has a worse efficiency.

The quality of test data has an important effect on the fault-revealing ability of software testing. Search-based test data generation reformulates testing goals as fitness functions, thus, test data generation can be automated by meta-heuristic algorithms. Meta-heuristic algorithms search the domain of input variables in order to find input data that cover the targets. The domain of input variables is very large, even for simple programs, while this size has a major influence on the efficiency and effectiveness of all search-based methods. Despite the large volume of works on search-based test data generation, the literature contains few approaches that concern the impact of search space reduction. In order to partition the input domain, this study defines a relationship between the structure of the program and the input domain. Based on this relationship, we propose a method for partitioning the input domain. Then, to search in the partitioned search space, we select ant colony optimization as one of the important and prosperous meta-heuristic algorithms. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in comparison with the previous work, we selected a number of different benchmark programs. The experimental results show that our approach has 14.40% better average coverage versus the competitive approach.