Unit test generation for common and uncommon behaviors

Abstract

Various search-based test generation techniques have been proposed to automate the process of test generation to fulfill different criteria (e.g., line coverage, branch coverage, mutation score, etc.). Despite these techniques' undeniable accomplishments, they still suffer from a lack of guidance coming from the data gathered from the production phase, which makes the generation of complex test cases harder for the search process. Hence, previous studies introduced many strategies (such as dynamic symbolic execution or seeding) to address this issue. However, the test cases created by these techniques cannot assure the full coverage of the execution paths in software under test. Therefore, this thesis introduces common and uncommon behavior test generation (CUBTG) for search-based unit test generation. CUBTG uses the concept of commonality score, which is a measure of how close an execution path of a generated test case is from reproducing the same common and uncommon execution patterns observed during the real-world usage of the software. To evaluate the performance of CUBTG, we implemented it in EvoSuite and evaluated it on 150 classes from JabRef, an open-source application for managing bibliography references. We found that CUBTG managed to cover more common behaviors than plain MOSA in 75% of the cases, and more uncommon behaviors in 60% of the cases. In up to 10% of the cases CUBTG managed to find more mutants seeded by PIT by using method sequences that plain MOSA did not find.