Evolutionary unit testing of object-oriented software using strongly-typed genetic programming

• Authors: Stefan Wappler;Joachim Wegener
• Venue: Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
• Year: 2006

Evolutionary algorithms have successfully been applied to software testing. Not only approaches that search for numeric test data for procedural test objects have been investigated, but also techniques for automatically generating test programs that represent object-oriented unit test cases. Compared to numeric test data, test programs optimized for object-oriented unit testing are more complex. Method call sequences that realize interesting test scenarios must be evolved. An arbitrary method call sequence is not necessarily feasible due to call dependences which exist among the methods that potentially appear in a method call sequence. The approach presented in this paper relies on a tree-based representation of method call sequences by which sequence feasibility is preserved throughout the entire search process. In contrast to other approaches in this area, neither repair of individuals nor penalty mechanisms are required. Strongly-typed genetic programming is employed to generate method call trees. In order to deal with runtime exceptions, we use an extended distance-based fitness function. We performed experiments with four test objects. The initial results are promising: high code coverages were achieved completely automatically for all of the test objects.