Handling dynamic data structures in search based testing

There has been little attention to search based test data generation in the presence of pointer inputs and dynamic data structures, an area in which recent concolic methods have excelled. This paper introduces a search based testing approach which is able to handle pointers and dynamic data structures. It combines an alternating variable hill climb with a set of constraint solving rules for pointer inputs. The result is a lightweight and efficient method, as shown in the results from a case study, which compares the method to CUTE, a concolic unit testing tool. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.5 [Software Engineering]: Testing and Debugging General Terms: Algorithms, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Kiran Lakhotia, Mark Harman, Phil McMinn
• Keywords: Dynamic Data Structures, GECCO 2008, Optimization, Pointer Inputs, Search Based Testing