Title
Commonality-Driven Unit Test Generation
Author
Evers, B. (Student TU Delft)
Derakhshanfar, P. (TU Delft Software Engineering) 
Devroey, Xavier (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Zaidman, A.E. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Contributor
Aleti, Aldeida (editor)
Panichella, Annibale (editor)
Date
2020-10
Abstract
Various search-based test generation techniques have been proposed to automate the generation of unit tests fulfilling different criteria (e.g., line coverage, branch coverage, mutation score, etc.). Despite several advances made over the years, search-based unit test generation still suffers from a lack of guidance due to the limited amount of information available in the source code that, for instance, hampers the generation of complex objects. Previous studies introduced many strategies to address this issue, e.g., dynamic symbolic execution or seeding, but do not take the internal execution of the methods into account. In this paper, we introduce a novel secondary objective called commonality score, measuring how close the execution path of a test case is from reproducing a common or uncommon execution pattern observed during the operation of the software. To assess the commonality score, we implemented it in EvoSuite and evaluated its application on 150 classes from JabRef, an open-source software for managing bibliography references. Our results are mixed. Our approach leads to test cases that indeed follow common or uncommon execution patterns. However, if the commonality score can have a positive impact on the structural coverage and mutation score of the generated test suites, it can also be detrimental in some cases.
Subject
Automated unit testing
Common paths coverage
Search-based software testing
Secondary objective
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:affa2ba5-5c79-474a-b67c-776cfeba0583
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59762-7_9
Publisher
Springer, Cham
Embargo date
2022-07-01
ISBN
978-3-030-59761-0
Source
Search-Based Software Engineering - 12th International Symposium, SSBSE 2020
Event
12th Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, 2020-10-07 → 2020-10-08, Online, , Italy
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 0302-9743, 12420 LNCS
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Part of collection
Institutional Repository
Document type
conference paper
Rights
© 2020 B. Evers, P. Derakhshanfar, Xavier Devroey, A.E. Zaidman