Theoretical analysis of local search in software testing

Authors:
Andrea Arcuri
Affiliations:
Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Norway
Venue:
SAGA'09 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Stochastic algorithms: foundations and applications
Year:
2009

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Abstract

The field of search based software engineering lacks of theoretical foundations. In this paper we theoretically analyse local search algorithms applied to software testing. We consider an infinitely large class of software that has an easy search landscape. Although the search landscape is easy, the software can be arbitrarily complex and large.We prove that Hill Climbing asymptotically has a strictly better runtime than Random Search. However, we prove that a very fast variant of Hill Climbing on reasonable size of software actually does not scale up properly. Although that variant has an exponential runtime, we prove that asymptotically it is still better than Random Search. We show that even on the easiest software testing problems, more sophisticated algorithms than local search are still required to get better performance.