Search-based failure discovery using testability transformations to generate pseudo-oracles

• Authors: Phil McMinn
• Venue: Proceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
• Year: 2009

Testability transformations are source-to-source program transformations that are designed to improve the testability of a program. This paper introduces a novel approach in which transformations are used to improve testability of a program by generating a pseudo-oracle. A pseudo-oracle is an alternative version of a program under test whose output can be compared with the original. Differences in output between the two programs may indicate a fault in the original program. Two transformations are presented. The first can highlight numerical inaccuracies in programs and cumulative roundoff errors, whilst the second may detect the presence of race conditions in multi-threaded code. Once a pseudo-oracle is generated, techniques are applied from the field of search-based testing to automatically find differences in output between the two versions of the program. The results of an experimental study presented in the paper show that both random testing and genetic algorithms are capable of utilizing the pseudo-oracles to automatically find program failures. Using genetic algorithms it is possible to explicitly maximize the discrepancies between the original programs and their pseudo-oracles. This allows for the production of test cases where the observable failure is highly pronounced, enabling the tester to establish the seriousness of the underlying fault.