Improving effectiveness of automated software testing in the absence of specifications

Program specifications can be valuable in improving the effectiveness of automated software testing in generating test inputs and checking test executions for correctness. Unfortunately, specifications are often absent from programs in practice. We present a framework for improving effectiveness of automated testing in the absence of specifications. The framework supports a set of related techniques, including redundant-test detection, non-redundant-test generation, test selection, test abstraction, and program-spectra comparison. The framework has been implemented and empirical results have shown that the developed techniques within the framework improve the effectiveness of automated testing by detecting high percentage of redundant tests among test inputs generated by existing tools, generating non-redundant test inputs to achieve high structural coverage, reducing inspection efforts for detecting problems in the program, and exposing behavioral differences during regression testing.