Abstract

Background: Software testing is a time consuming and costly process. Recent advances in complexity of software have gained attention among researchers towards the automation of generation of test data.

Objective: This paper focuses on the structural testing of object oriented paradigm based software and proposes a hybrid approach to automate the class testing applying heuristic algorithms.

Methods: The proposed algorithm performs data flow testing of classes applying all defuses adequacy criteria by automatically generating test cases. A nested 2-step methodology is applied using meta-heuristic genetic algorithm and its two variant (GA-variant1 and Ga-variant2) to produce optimized method sequences.

Results: An experiment is performed applying proposed algorithm on six test classes. The results suggest that proposed approach with GA-variant1 is better than other techniques in terms of Average d-u coverage and Average iterations.

Keywords: Test data generation, automatic class testing, data flow testing, genetic algorithm, search-based testing, control flow graph.

Graphical Abstract