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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
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