Automated test data generation for aspect-oriented programs

  • Authors:

  • Mark Harman;Fayezin Islam;Tao Xie;Stefan Wappler

  • Affiliations:

  • King's College London, London, United Kingdom;T-Zero Processing Services LLC, New York, NY, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;Berner & Mattner Systemtechnik GmbH, Berlin, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Despite the upsurge of interest in the Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm, there remain few results on test data generation techniques for AOP. Furthermore, there is no work on search-based optimization for test data generation, an approach that has been shown to be successful in other programming paradigms. In this paper, we introduce a search-based optimization approach to automated test data generation for structural coverage of AOP systems. We present the results of an empirical study that demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach. We also introduce a domain reduction approach for AOP testing and show that this approach not only reduces test effort, but also increases test effectiveness. This finding is significant, because similar studies for non-AOP programming paradigms show no such improvement in effectiveness, merely a reduction in effort. We also present the results of an empirical study of the reduction in test effort achieved by focusing specifically on branches inside aspects.