Augmenting test suites effectiveness by increasing output diversity

  • Authors:
  • Nadia Alshahwan;Mark Harman

  • Affiliations:
  • University College London, UK;University College London, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The uniqueness (or otherwise) of test outputs ought to have a bearing on test effectiveness, yet it has not previously been studied. In this paper we introduce a novel test suite adequacy criterion based on output uniqueness. We propose 4 definitions of output uniqueness with varying degrees of strictness. We present a preliminary evaluation for web application testing that confirms that output uniqueness enhances fault-finding effectiveness. The approach outperforms random augmentation in fault finding ability by an overall average of 280% in 5 medium sized, real world web applications.