Generating Mutated Strings for Automated Tests

Abstract

Unit testing is crucial for any software project. Writing these tests manually, however, can be quite cumbersome. To tackle this, automated testing has been growing in recent times. Unfortunately, most automated testing tools are a challenge to use. The TestCube Project intends to change that. They aim to make automated testing tools easy and fun to use with their TestCube plugin. Our project's goal is to help the TestCube project improve their plugin. A problem they face is regarding mutating and generating strings for new automated test cases. These strings can be long, random and hard to understand. Hence the question that is being tackled is `How can you design, implement and evaluate an extension to test amplification to generate easier to understand strings?'. To answer this question, first we research to see what other tools are available to mutate/generate strings. Next step, we see how we extend the current TestCube/Dspot plugin with techniques we research. After coming up with an implementation, we evaluate our tool by performing a user study through surveys. These surveys focused on a comparison between the output of TestCube's current approach and output of our approach of generating strings. We then conclude after receiving the results from the surveys that there is an improvement upon the pre-existing way that TestCube/Dpsot mutates strings for test cases at the moment.