About EXSYST


Test generation tools commonly aim to cover structural artefacts of software, such as the source code or the user interface. However, focusing only on source code can lead to unrealistic or irrelevant test cases, while exploring a user interface often misses much of the underlying program behavior. Our EXSYST tool takes a new approach by exploring user interfaces while aiming to maximize code coverage, thus combining the best of both worlds. Experiments show that such an approach can achieve high code coverage matching and exceeding the code coverage of traditional unit-based test generators; yet, by construction every test case is realistic and relevant, and every detected failure can be shown to be caused by a real sequence of input events.

We are currently busily working on releasing our EXSYST tool as open-source software, along with experimental setup and data comparing it to pre-existing test generation tools. We'll soon update this web site with more information. Until then you can watch a five-minute, short demo video motivating and demonstrating EXSYST.

EXSYST is being developed as part of the Software-Cluster project EMERGENT and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IC10S01 and by an ERC Advanced Grant on Specification Mining and Testing. It is additionally funded by the Google Focused Research Award on Test Amplification.