Reference-Based Testing Technique for Automated Test Generation

This paper introduces a technique to generate tests automatically for the legacy code by utilizing existing software assets. Many aspects of the legacy code needs to be tested, such as, classes, methods, interfaces, relations, dependencies, etc. The proposed technique automatically generates tests by examining software packages that use the system under test to be tested. It presents an automatic test method based on searching calls to the APIs being tested in available repositories, ranking the relevance of the mined calls, and using them to generate test cases. It makes three important contributions for the issue. First, it provides an automatic way to build a test skeleton. Second, it finds previously unknown bugs and obviously unused dead codes by achieving high test coverage. Finally, developers confidently make changes to the codes written by someone else.