Writing test cases is an important yet complex task. Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) is an automated test case generation technique that aims to help developers by creating high-coverage test cases. Despite its strengths, a major limitation of this technique is that it often struggles with generating test cases that contain complex method sequences, as they have no semantic understanding of which methods are related. The recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a potential solution due to their natural language capabilities and applicability to software engineering tasks. However, LLMs often end up with lower coverage than SBST when directly compared due to lacking the output diversity that is required in software testing. This opens an opportunity to combine the exploratory power of SBST, with the semantic understanding of LLMs to make the test case generation process more effective in terms of test coverage and test structure. This thesis investigates the combination of these methodologies with our hybrid approach, LLM-Seeded Evolutionary Testing (LSET), which uses LLMs to generate tests that contain complex method sequences, and introduces this structure into the SBST process by serving as the starting point (seeds) of the algorithm to be evolved further. We conducted an empirical evaluation on a benchmark consisting of 35 JavaScript classes and found a significant branch coverage increase on 19 and 14 classes when compared to SBST and LLM-only baselines. However, when taking the combination of final SBST and LLM test suites, this gap reduces to 1 out of 35 classes. Beyond coverage, we also found a positive effect on structure when compared to tests generated by SBST, as the structure provided by the LLM tests can be further evolved to reach deeper branches while maintaining readability.
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Software testing is an important but time-consuming task, making automatic test case generation an appealing solution. The current state-of-the-art algorithm for test case generation is DynaMOSA, which is an improvement of NSGA-II that applies domain knowledge to make it more suitable for test case generation. Although these enhancements are applicable to other evolutionary algorithms,
no research has been done on how effective other algorithms can function as the base. In this paper, we apply the DynaMOSA modifications to SPEA-II to create a new algorithm, DynaSPEA-II. We conduct an empirical experiment where we evaluate the DynaMOSA enhancements, and directly compare DynaSPEA-II to
DynaMOSA. The algorithms are assessed on a benchmark consisting of 36 diverse JavaScript classes w.r.t. branch coverage. Our results show that adding DynaMOSA enhancements to SPEA-II results in higher coverage in 13.9% of classes, with an average increase of 4.92% for classes where a statistically significant difference was found. DynaSPEA-II performed equally to DynaMOSA, with no statistically significant difference being found between the two. ... Read more