Automatic identification of common and special object-oriented unit tests

Tao Xie

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Common and special test inputs can be created to exercise some common and special behavior of the class under test, respectively. Although manually created tests are valuable, programmers often overlook some special test inputs. If programmers write down specifications, special or common tests can be automatically generated and selected by tools. However, specifications are not commonly written in practice. This research develops a novel approach for automatically identifying common and special unit tests for a class without requiring any specification. Given a class, our approach automatically generates test inputs and identifies common and special tests among the generated tests. Programmers can inspect these identified tests and use them to augment existing (manual) tests. Our approach is based on statistical algebraic abstractions, program properties (in the form of algebraic specifications) dynamically inferred from test executions. We use statistical algebraic abstractions to characterize program behavior. A test is identified to be common if the test exercises a behavior that is universally or commonly exercised by generated tests, or to be special if the test violates a behavior that is commonly exercised by generated tests.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationOOPSLA'04 - Conference Companion
Subtitle of host publication19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
Pages324-325
Number of pages2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
Externally publishedYes
Event19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA'04 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: Oct 24 2004Oct 28 2004

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA

Conference

Conference19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA'04
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period10/24/0410/28/04

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Automatic identification of common and special object-oriented unit tests'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this