An Automated Framework for Structural Test-Data Generation.

In the proceedings of the 13th IEEE Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE).

Nigel Tracey, John Clark, Keith Mander and John McDermid.

Structural testing criteria are mandated in many software development standards and guidelines. The process of generating test-data to achieve 100% coverage of a given structural coverage metric is labour intensive and expensive. This paper presents an approach to automate the generation of such test-data. The test-data generation is based on the application of a dynamic optimisation-based search for the required test-data. The same approach can be be generalised to solve other test-data generation problems. Three such applications are discussed -- boundary value analysis, assertion/run-time exception testing and component re-use testing. A prototype tool-set has been developed to facilitate the automatic generation of test-data for these structural testing problems. The results of preliminary experiments using this technique and the prototype tool-set are presented and show the efficiency and effectiveness of this approach.

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