RepOK-based reduction of bounded exhaustive testing

BEGOLEA, VALERIA; AGUIRRE, NAZARENO; MARINOV, DARKO; FRIAS, MARCELO FABIAN

SOFTWARE TESTING, VERIFICATION & RELIABILITY

JOHN WILEY & SONS LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2014 vol. 24 p. 629 - 655

0960-0833

While the effectiveness of bounded-exhaustive test suites increases as one increases the scope for the bounded-exhaustive generation, both the time for test generation and for test execution grow exponentially with respect to the scope. We propose a set of techniques for reducing the time for bounded-exhaustive testing, by either reducing the generation time, or reducing obtained bounded-exhaustive suites. We exploit the representation invariant of the software under test?s input, implemented as a repOK routine, in two ways: (i) to factor out separate representation invariants for disjoint substructures of the inputs, and (ii) to partition valid inputs into equivalence classes, according to how these exercise the repOK code. The first is used in to split the test input generation process, since disjoint substructures can be independently generated. The second is used in order to reduce the size of a bounded-exhaustive test suite, by removing from the suite those tests that are equivalent to some test already present in the suite.