A study of various automated test oracle methods

Software Testing has been a costly process used in industry for purpose of verification of software. It consumes nearly thirty to fifty percent of the entire software development cost. Test oracle is considered as an important component of the testing process, which ensures about the correctness of software behavior. In search based test generations, specification based test generations or in intelligent agents there is large volume of test inputs generated automatically. To define test oracle manually for each of the test input separately is a time taking and costlier process. Automatic generation and execution of tests can cover many conditions without significant increment in cost. This issue of automatic generations of test cases is known as oracle problem. Automation of test oracles is a challenging task. To automate the process of test oracle, automation of expected output generation and automation of verification of results is also required. This paper discusses about some current processes used for generation of automated test oracle and what can be the possible challenges faced to automate test oracle process. This paper also discusses on existing automated test oracle generation methods or tools and their way of generation of expected outputs.