Evolutionary testing of classes
Abstract
Object oriented programming promotes reuse of classes in multiple contexts. Thus, a class is designed and implemented with several usage scenarios in mind, some of which possibly open and generic. Correspondingly, the unit testing of classes cannot make too strict assumptions on the actual method invocation sequences, since these vary from application to application.In this paper, a genetic algorithm is exploited to automatically produce test cases for the unit testing of classes in a generic usage scenario. Test cases are described by chromosomes, which include information on which objects to create, which methods to invoke and which values to use as inputs. The proposed algorithm mutates them with the aim of maximizing a given coverage measure. The implementation of the algorithm and its application to classes from the Java standard library are described.
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The number of tests needed to evaluate every possible value pair can be significantly smaller than the exhaustive testing alternative.
“The number of tests needed to evaluate every possible value pair can be significantly smaller than the exhaustive testing alternative since each test can simultaneously contribute to multiple value pairs [22, 44, 80].”
From Fairness testing: testing software for discrimination (2017) · cites this paper as [80]
Cites
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Fraser, G., & Arcuri, A. (2013) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2012.14 · Cited by 586 · see citing works
Fairness testing: testing software for discrimination
Galhotra, S., Brun, Y., & Meliou, A. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3106237.3106277 · Cited by 405 · see citing works
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Automatically Generating Test Cases for Specification Mining
Dallmeier, V., Knopp, N., Mallon, C., Fraser, G., Hack, S., & Zeller, A. (2012) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2011.105 · Cited by 67 · see citing works
- Authors
- Tonella, P.
- Affiliations
- ITC-irst, Povo (Trento), Italy
- Corresponding author
- Tonella, Paolo
- ORCID
- Tonella, Paolo
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2004-07
- Pages
- 119-128
- OpenAlex
- W2082274331
- Cited by
- 410
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 20 · 2015: 30 · 2014: 32 · 2013: 28 · 2012: 26
- FWCI
- 7.02
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Keywords
- evolutionary testing, genetic algorithm, test case generation, code coverage, object-oriented software, Java standard library
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