Automated Behavioral Regression Testing

—When a program is modified during software evolution, developers typically run the new version of the program against its existing test suite to validate that the changes made on the program did not introduce unintended side effects (i.e., regression faults). This kind of regression testing can be effective in identifying some regression faults, but it is limited by the quality of the existing test suite. Due to the cost of testing, developers build test suites by finding acceptable tradeoffs between cost and thoroughness of the tests. As a result, these test suites tend to exercise only a small subset of the program’s functionality and may be inadequate for testing the changes in a program. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called BEhavioral Regression Testing (BERT). Given two versions of a program, BERT identifies behavioral differences between the two versions through dynamical analysis, in three steps. First, it generates a large number of test inputs that...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICST
• Authors: Wei Jin, Alessandro Orso, Tao Xie
• Keywords: ICST 2010, Regression Faults, Regression Testing, Software Engineering, Test Suites