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Evolutionary testing: a case study

Published: 23 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The paper presents a case study of applying genetic algorithms (GAs) to the automatic test data generation problem. We present the basic techniques implemented in our prototype test generation system, whose goal is to get branch coverage of the program under testing. We used our tool to experiment with simple programs, programs that have been used by others for test strategies benchmarking and the UNIX utility uniq. The effectiveness of GA-based testing system is compared with a Random testing system. We found that for simple programs both testing systems work fine, but as the complexity of the program or the complexity of input domain grows, GA-based testing system significantly outperforms Random testing.

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Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings
HVC'06: Proceedings of the 2nd international Haifa verification conference on Hardware and software, verification and testing
October 2006
235 pages
ISBN:9783540708889
  • Editors:
  • Eyal Bin,
  • Avi Ziv,
  • Shmuel Ur

Sponsors

  • CRI
  • IBM: IBM

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2006

Author Tags

  1. automatic test generation
  2. genetic algorithms
  3. software testing

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