Mutation based test case generation via a path selection strategy
Information and Software Technology
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Software testing forms a substantial activity of the software development cycle. Although important, it lacks from being automated mainly because of the various undecidable problems that it encounters. To this extend efficient heuristics have been proposed in order to bypass this problem. One such approach, called symbolic execution, is usually used for automating the test data generation activity. In this paper, an automated symbolic execution tool is proposed. The tool employs an efficient path heuristic, integrated with random testing for producing test cases. The tool handles the path explosion and constraint solving problems efficiently. This is achieved by targeting on specific likely to be feasible paths and by using a linear programming approach for the determination of their feasibility. Preliminary results are very encouraging as they show that a high coverage can be achieved within a limited amount of time-effort.