Palus: a hybrid automated test generation tool for java

• Authors: Sai Zhang
• Venue: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
• Year: 2011

In object-oriented programs, a unit test often consists of a sequence of method calls that create and mutate objects. It is challenging to automatically generate sequences that are legal and behaviorally-diverse, that is, reaching as many different program states as possible. This paper proposes a combined static and dynamic test generation approach to address these problems, for code without a formal specification. Our approach first uses dynamic analysis to infer a call sequence model from a sample execution, then uses static analysis to identify method dependence relations based on the fields they may read or write. Finally, both the dynamically-inferred model (which tends to be accurate but incomplete) and the statically-identified dependence information (which tends to be conservative) guide a random test generator to create legal and behaviorally-diverse tests. Our Palus tool implements this approach. We compared it with a pure random approach, a dynamic-random approach (without a static phase), and a static-random approach (without a dynamic phase) on six popular open-source Java programs. Tests generated by Palus achieved 35% higher structural coverage on average. Palus is also internally used in Google, and has found 22 new bugs in four well-tested products.