TestFul: An Evolutionary Test Approach for Java

Abstract—This paper presents TestFul, an evolutionary testing approach for Java classes that works both at class and method level. TestFul exploits a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to identify the “best” tests. The paper introduces the main elements of TestFul. It also compares TestFul against well-known search-based solutions using a set of classes taken from literature, known software libraries, and independent testing benchmarks. The comparison considers statement and branch coverage, size of generated tests, and generation time. On considered classes, TestFul generates better tests than other search-based solutions, and achieves higher structural coverages with tests small enough to be usable. Keywords-Test Generation, Evolutionary Algorithms, Stateful Systems, Object-Oriented Paradigm, Multi-Objective Optimization

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICST
• Authors: Luciano Baresi, Pier Luca Lanzi, Matteo Miraz
• Keywords: Evolutionary Algorithms, ICST 2010, Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm, Search-based Solutions, Software Engineering