Testing container classes: random or systematic?

  • Authors:

  • Rohan Sharma;Milos Gligoric;Andrea Arcuri;Gordon Fraser;Darko Marinov

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Illinois, Urbana, IL;University of Illinois, Urbana, IL;Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Norway;Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany;University of Illinois, Urbana, IL

  • Venue:
  • FASE'11/ETAPS'11 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Fundamental approaches to software engineering: part of the joint European conferences on theory and practice of software
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Container classes such as lists, sets, or maps are elementary data structures common to many programming languages. Since they are a part of standard libraries, they are important to test, which led to research on advanced testing techniques targeting such containers and research on comparing testing techniques using such containers. However, these techniques have not been thoroughly compared to simpler techniques such as random testing. We present the results of a larger case study in which we compare random testing with shape abstraction, a systematic technique that showed the best results in a previous study. Our experiments show that random testing is about as effective as shape abstraction for testing these containers, which raises the question whether containers are well suited as a benchmark for comparing advanced testing techniques.