An Analysis on the Applicability of Meta-Heuristic Searching Techniques for Automated Test Data Generation in Automatic Programming Assessment

حظي تقييم البرمجة التلقائي (APA) بالكثير من الاهتمام بين الباحثين بشكل أساسي لدعم الدرجات الآلية ووضع علامات على المهامالمكلف بادائها الطلاب أو التدريبات بشكل منهجي. يتم تعريف APA بشكل شائع كطريقة يمكن أن تعزز الدقة والكفاءة والاتساق وكذلك تقديمملاحظات فورية لحلول للطلاب. في تحقيق APA ، تعد عملية إنشاء بيانات الاختبار مهمة للغاية وذلك لإجراء اختبار ديناميكي لمهمةالطلاب. في مجال اختبار البرمجيات ، أوضحت العديد من الأبحاث التي تركز على توليد بيانات الاختبار نجاح اعتماد تقنيات البحث الفوقية(MHST) من أجل تعزيز إجراءات استنباط بيانات الاختبار المناسبة للاختبار الفعال. ومع ذلك، فإن الأبحاث التي أجريت على APA حتىالآن لم تستغل بعد التقنيات المفيدة لتشمل تغطية اختبار جودة برنامج أفضل. لذلك ، أجرت هذه الدراسة تقييماً مقارنا لتحديد أي تقنية بحثفوقي قابلة للتطبيق لدعم كفاءة توليد بيانات الاختبار الآلي (ATDG) في تنفيذ اختبار وظيفي ديناميكي. في تقييم البرمجة التلقائي يتم تضمينالعديد من تقنيات البحث الفوقية الحديثة في التقييم المقارن الذي يجمع بين كل من خوارزميات البحث المحلية والعالمية من عام 2000 حتىعام 2018 .تشير نتيجة هذه الدراسة إلى أن تهجين Cuckoo Search مع Tabu Search و lévy flight كواحدة من طرق البحث الفوقية الواعدةليتم تطبيقها ، حيث أنه يتفوق على الطرق الفوقية الأخرى فيما يتعلق بعدد التكرارات ونطاق المدخلات.Automatic Programming Assessment (APA) has been gaining lots of attention among researchers mainly to support automated grading and marking of students’ programming assignments or exercises systematically. APA is commonly identified as a method that can enhance accuracy, efficiency and consistency as well as providing instant feedback on students’ programming solutions. In achieving APA, test data generation process is very important so as to perform a dynamic testing on students’ assignment. In software testing field, many researches that focus on test data generation have demonstrated the successful of adoption of Meta-Heuristic Search Techniques (MHST) so as to enhance the procedure of deriving adequate test data for efficient testing. Nonetheless, thus far the researches on APA have not yet usefully exploited the techniques accordingly to include a better quality program testing coverage. Therefore, this study has conducted a comparative evaluation to identify any applicable MHST to support efficient Automated Test Data Generation (ATDG) in executing a dynamic-functional testing in APA. Several recent MHST are included in the comparative evaluation combining both the local and global search algorithms ranging from the year of 2000 until 2018. Result of this study suggests that the hybridization of Cuckoo Search with Tabu Search and lévy flight as one of promising MHST to be applied, as it’s outperforms other MHST with regards to number of iterations and range of inputs

Object Constraint Language Based Test Case Optimisation

Software testing, a pivotal phase in the Software Develop- ment Life Cycle (SDLC), ensures the correctness and perfor- mance of the corresponding software system. Model-based testing (MBT) is a method to validate whether the software system or specification satisfies the pre-defined requirements through design models. However, with modern systems ex- panding in complexity, testing has become a labour-intensive and unpredictable process within the SDLC. Therefore, many test case optimisation (TCO) techniques have been proposed to make the testing process more manageable. But these ap- proaches predominantly focus on code-based strategies, leav- ing systems expressed in Object Constraint Language (OCL) underserved. OCL is a part of the Unified Modeling Lan- guage (UML) standard and is a type of declarative language used to describe system specification by pre- and post- con- ditions. Initially, OCL has been proposed as a constraint language to add more details to the UML model, but along- side the development of OCL itself, there are more and more systems whose specifications are expressed in OCL.This thesis aims to systematically investigate the feasibil- ity of applying TCO techniques to the OCL-defined systems, with an emphasis on test case prioritisation (TCP) and test case minimisation (TCM) processes. A systematic literature review for the directly related topic, UML-based test case generation, is conducted in this thesis. Also, we adapted a set of test case optimisation algorithms and compared the performance between these algorithms under the context of OCL. Moreover, we modified one metric for the TCP evalu- ation process, which made the metric more suitable for the MBT and mutation testing environment. Furthermore, we introduce a full set of mutation operators and corresponding classifications to the OCL standard library, offering practical guidance for optimisation processes.The proposed TCO processes are validated and evalu- ated through four real-world systems expressed in OCL with different complexities. The experiment results demonstrate that for the TCM process, the size of the minimised test suite is reduced from 33.33% to 81.8% without losing any fault de- tection ability. For the TCP process, leveraging the modified evaluation metric, the improvements are up to 50%, indicat- ing that the prioritised test suite can detect system defects earlier when compared to the original one. Evaluating based on the considerations of effectiveness, efficiency and stability, we suggest the NSGA-II for the TCM process and the genetic algorithm for the TCP process. When combining TCP and TCM processes, the TCM process consistently increases the efficiency of the TCP process by reducing the search space for the prioritisation process