Carving differential unit test cases from system test cases

Abstract

Unit test cases are focused and efficient. System tests are effective at exercising complex usage patterns. Differential unit tests (DUT) are a hybrid of unit and system tests. They are generated by carving the system components, while executing a system test case, that influence the behavior of the target unit, and then re-assembling those components so that the unit can be exercised as it was by the system test. We conjecture that DUTs retain some of the advantages of unit tests, can be automatically and inexpensively generated, and have the potential for revealing faults related to intricate system executions. In this paper we present a framework for automatically carving and replaying DUTs that accounts for a wide-variety of strategies, we implement an instance of the framework with several techniques to mitigate test cost and enhance flexibility, and we empirically assess the efficacy of carving and replaying DUTs.

Early Detection of Collaboration Conflicts and Risks

“…Continuous testing requires small unit tests that can execute quickly. Test factoring automatically carves large system-wide tests into such unit tests [16], [35].…”

Dynamic data-flow testing

“…Dynamic data analysis is used in the context of testing to synthesize unit test cases from system ones [SAPE05,ECDD06]. These approaches run system-wide tests, and synthetize unit test cases by suitably identifying and tailor components and behaviors.…”

Automation of QA in the Project of DB Migration from SQL Server into Oracle

“…It is a special case of random testing to detect differences between different implementations. Regression testing is discussed in [10] where differential unit-tests are proposed for detecting differences between versions of the same unit. In paper [11] a tool which can identify the cause of regressions by trace analyzing is discussed.…”