Journal
INFORMATION SCIENCES
Volume 178, Issue 15, Pages 3075-3095Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2007.11.024
Keywords
software testing; object-oriented software; containers; search algorithms; nature inspired algorithms; search based software engineering; testability transformations; white box testing
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Funding
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/D052785/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- EPSRC [EP/D052785/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Automatic software testing tools are still far from ideal for real world object-oriented (OO) software. The use of nature inspired search algorithms for this problem has been investigated recently. Testing complex data structures (e.g., containers) is very challenging since testing software with simple states is already hard. Because containers are used in almost every type of software, their reliability is of utmost importance. Hence, this paper focuses on the difficulties of testing container classes with nature inspired search algorithms. We will first describe how input data can be automatically generated for testing Java containers. Input space reductions and a novel testability transformation are presented to aid the search algorithms. Different search algorithms are then considered and studied in order to understand when and why a search algorithm is effective for a testing problem. In our experiments, these nature inspired search algorithms seem to give better results than the traditional techniques described in literature. Besides, the problem of minimising the length of the test sequences is also addressed. Finally, some open research questions are given. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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