Evolutionary test environment for automatic structural testing

Testing is the most significant analytic quality assurance measure for software, Systematic design of test cases is crucial for the test quality. Structure-oriented test methods, which define test cases on the basis of the internal program structures, are widely used. A promising approach for the automation of structural test case design is evolutionary testing. Evolutionary testing searches test data that fulfil a given structural test criteria by means of evolutionary computation. In this work, an evolutionary test environment has been developed that performs fully automatic test data generation for most structural test methods. The introduction of an approximation level for fitness evaluation of generated test data and the definition of an efficient test strategy for processing test goals, increases the performance of evolutionary testing considerably. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.