TestFul: An Evolutionary Test Approach for Java

Testing Container Classes: Random or Systematic?

“…The empirical evidence on research in this area often focuses on container classes [4,5,6,7,10,12,14,17,19,22,23,26,27,29,30,31,33,34]-containers are an important part of many standard libraries, and bugs in these containers could significantly affect applications, so directing testing efforts to these containers is worthwhile. Testing containers is not only important but also challenging to achieve with some advanced testing technique such as those based on symbolic execution [30].…”

Evolutionary Generation of Whole Test Suites

“…In case of ties, we assign better ranks to smaller test suites. Notice that including the length directly in the fitness function (as for example done in [6], [7]), might have side-effects, because we would need to put together and linearly combine two values of different units of measure. Furthermore, although we have two distinct objectives, coverage is more important than size.…”

“…There are some notable exceptions in search based software testing. The works of Arcuri and Yao [6] and Baresi et al [7] use a single sequence of function calls to maximize the number of covered branches while minimizing the length of such a test case. A drawback of such an approach is that there can be conflicting testing goals, and it might be impossible to cover all of them with a single test sequence regardless of its length.…”

Dynamic data-flow testing

“…Miraz et al improved over Tonella's approach by proposing a technique that explicitly considers also the internal state of objects to drive the search [BLM10]. Their TestFul technique implements an hybrid evolutionary algorithm that alternate global search to cover the internal states of objects, and local search to satisfy the branches of methods.…”

“…We extended search based testing techniques [FA11a,BLM10] by implementing a fitness function that targets the contextual definition use pairs computed in the former two steps.…”