Efficient Test Generation Guided by Field Coverage Criteria

ARIEL GODIO; VALERIA BENGOLEA; PABLO PONZIO; NAZARENO AGUIRRE; MARCELO F. FRIAS

Conferencia; 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE); 2019

Field-exhaustive testing is a testing criterion suitable for object-oriented code over complex, heap-allocated, data structures. It requires test suites to contain enough test inputs to cover all feasible values for the object´s fields within a certain scope (input-size bound). While previous work shows that field-exhaustive suites can be automatically generated, the generation technique required a formal specification of the inputs that can be subject to SAT-based analysis. Moreover, the restriction of producing all feasible values for inputs´ fields makes test generation costly. In this paper, we deal with field coverage as testing criteria that measure the quality of a test suite in terms of coverage and mutation score, by examining to what extent the values of inputs´ fields are covered. In particular, we consider field coverage in combination with test generation based on symbolic execution to produce underapproximations of field-exhaustive suites, using the Symbolic Pathfinder tool. To underapproximate these suites we use tranScoping, a technique that estimates characteristics of yet to be run analyses for large scopes, based on data obtained from analyses performed in small scopes. This provides us with a suitable condition to prematurely stop the symbolic execution. As we show, tranScoping different metrics regarding field coverage allows us to produce significantly smaller suites using a fraction of the generation time. All this while retaining the effectiveness of field exhaustive suites in terms of test suite quality.