Title :
Evolutionary testing of unstructured programs in the presence of flag problems
Author :
Liu, Xiyang ; Lei, Ning ; Liu, Hehui ; Wang, Bin
Author_Institution :
Software Eng. Inst., Xidian Univ., Xi´´an, China
Abstract :
Automated test data generation is always a hot topic in software engineering, and evolutionary testing (ET) is an emerging and promising technology for this purpose. However, in structural testing, the presence of flag variables lead evolutionary testing degenerate to random testing. All previous work only focused on the flag problem in structural programs, and no attention has been paid to unstructured programs with flag conditions, although numerous industrial real-world programs are of this kind. In this paper, as a further step of the author´s research, a fitness calculation rule for flag conditions in unstructured programs is proposed. The experiments on exemplifications recurrent in industrial real-world programs, such as Linux and NS2, show that our new fitness calculation rule could effectively guide evolutionary search to successfully find the required test data at low cost, while all previous approaches failed.
Keywords :
evolutionary computation; program testing; program verification; search problems; Linux; NS2; automated test data generation; evolutionary search; fitness calculation rule; flag variables; industrial real-world programs; random testing; software engineering; structural testing; unstructured program evolutionary testing; Automatic testing; Cost function; Linux; Search problems; Software engineering; Software testing;
Conference_Titel :
Software Engineering Conference, 2005. APSEC '05. 12th Asia-Pacific
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2465-6
DOI :
10.1109/APSEC.2005.65