Reducing the costs of bounded-exhaustive testing

Vilas Jagannath, Yun Young Lee, Brett Daniel, Darko Marinov

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

Abstract

Bounded-exhaustive testing is an automated testing methodology that checks the code under test for all inputs within given bounds: first the user describes a set of test inputs and provides test oracles that check test outputs; then the tool generates all the inputs, executes them on the code under test, and checks the outputs; and finally the user inspects failing tests to submit bug reports. The costs of boundedexhaustive testing include machine time for test generation and execution (which translates into human time waiting for these results) and human time for inspection of results. This paper proposes three techniques that reduce these costs. Sparse Test Generation skips some tests to reduce the time to the first failing test. Structural Test Merging generates a smaller number of larger test inputs (rather than a larger number of smaller test inputs) to reduce test generation and execution time. Oracle-based Test Clustering groups failing tests to reduce the inspection time. Results obtained from the bounded-exhaustive testing of the Eclipse refactoring engine show that these three techniques can substantially reduce the costs while mostly preserving fault-detection capability.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationFundamental Approaches to Software Engineering - 12th International Conference, FASE 2009, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2009, Proceedings.
Pages171-185
Number of pages15
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event12th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2009 -
Duration: Mar 22 2009Mar 29 2009

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5503
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other12th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2009
Period3/22/093/29/09

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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