Automated Test Case Generation using Unsupervised Type Inference for JavaScript

Master thesis (2022)

Authors

D.M. Stallenberg Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

A. Panichella Software Engineering - EEMCS (mentor)
Mitchell Olsthoorn Software Engineering - EEMCS (mentor)
A. van Deursen Software Technology (graduation committee member)
Lydia Y. Chen Data-Intensive Systems - EEMCS (graduation committee member)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Dimitri Stallenberg
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Published Date

11-10-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Traditional software testing is a labor-intensive and expensive manual process. To mitigate the high cost of manual test case generation, researchers have developed various techniques for automated test case generation over the last few decades. These techniques make use of static type information to determine which data types should be used in new test cases. Dynamically typed languages like JavaScript do not provide type information. The lack of type information poses a new challenge for test case generation techniques.
In this thesis, we propose a novel unsupervised probabilistic type inference approach to infer data types in a test case generation context. The approach uses both static and dynamic type inference techniques. We implemented the approach in a novel tool called SYNTEST-JAVASCRIPT which is an extension of the SYNTEST-FRAMEWORK. We evaluate the performance of the approach compared to random type sampling with respect to branch coverage. The evaluation is done using a custom benchmark of 97 units under test.
Our results show that using statically inferred type achieves a statistically significant increase in 54% of the benchmark files compared to the baseline. The combination of using both statically and dynamically inferred types improves the approach slightly with a significant increase in 56% of the benchmark files compared to the baseline. Finally, the results show that the time consumed by the static and dynamic type inference is insignificant compared to the total time budget and is worthwhile given the performance boost type inference provides.