6,243 research outputs found
Hybrid Algorithms Based on Integer Programming for the Search of Prioritized Test Data in Software Product Lines
In Software Product Lines (SPLs) it is not possible, in general, to test all products of the family. The number of products denoted by a SPL is very high due to the combinatorial explosion of features. For this reason, some coverage criteria have been proposed which try to test at least all feature interactions without the necessity to test all products, e.g., all pairs of features (pairwise coverage). In addition, it is desirable to first test products composed by a set of priority features. This problem is known as the Prioritized Pairwise Test Data Generation Problem. In this work we propose two hybrid algorithms using Integer Programming (IP) to generate a prioritized test suite. The first one is based on an integer linear formulation and the second one is based on a integer quadratic (nonlinear) formulation. We compare these techniques with two state-of-the-art algorithms, the Parallel Prioritized Genetic Solver (PPGS) and a greedy algorithm called prioritized-ICPL. Our study reveals that our hybrid nonlinear approach is clearly the best in both, solution quality and computation time. Moreover, the nonlinear variant (the fastest one) is 27 and 42 times faster than PPGS in the two groups of instances analyzed in this work.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucĂa Tech. Partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER under contract TIN2014-57341-R, the University of Málaga, AndalucĂa Tech and the Spanish Network TIN2015-71841-REDT (SEBASENet)
Test Set Diameter: Quantifying the Diversity of Sets of Test Cases
A common and natural intuition among software testers is that test cases need
to differ if a software system is to be tested properly and its quality
ensured. Consequently, much research has gone into formulating distance
measures for how test cases, their inputs and/or their outputs differ. However,
common to these proposals is that they are data type specific and/or calculate
the diversity only between pairs of test inputs, traces or outputs.
We propose a new metric to measure the diversity of sets of tests: the test
set diameter (TSDm). It extends our earlier, pairwise test diversity metrics
based on recent advances in information theory regarding the calculation of the
normalized compression distance (NCD) for multisets. An advantage is that TSDm
can be applied regardless of data type and on any test-related information, not
only the test inputs. A downside is the increased computational time compared
to competing approaches.
Our experiments on four different systems show that the test set diameter can
help select test sets with higher structural and fault coverage than random
selection even when only applied to test inputs. This can enable early test
design and selection, prior to even having a software system to test, and
complement other types of test automation and analysis. We argue that this
quantification of test set diversity creates a number of opportunities to
better understand software quality and provides practical ways to increase it.Comment: In submissio
Feedback driven adaptive combinatorial testing
The configuration spaces of modern software systems are too large to test exhaustively. Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) approaches, such as covering arrays, systematically sample the configuration space and test only the selected configurations. The basic justification for CIT approaches is that they can cost-effectively exercise all system behaviors caused by the settings of t or fewer options. We conjecture, however, that in practice many such behaviors are not actually tested because of masking effects – failures that perturb execution so as to prevent some behaviors from being exercised. In this work we present a feedback-driven, adaptive, combinatorial testing approach aimed at detecting and working around masking effects. At each iteration we detect potential masking effects, heuristically isolate their likely causes, and then generate new covering arrays that allow previously masked combinations to be tested in the subsequent iteration. We empirically assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two large widely used open source software systems. Our results suggest that masking effects do exist and that our approach provides a promising and efficient way to work around them
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