It is Not the Length that Matters, It is How You Control It
- ICST 2011
by
Gordon Fraser, Andrea Arcuri
Proceedings of the fourth IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2011), March 2011.
Abstract
The length of test cases is a little investigated topic in search-based test generation for object oriented software, where test cases are sequences of method calls. While intuitively longer tests can achieve higher overall code coverage, there is always the threat of bloat - a complex phenomenon in evolutionary computation, where the length abnormally grows over time. In this paper, we show that bloat indeed also occurs in the context of test generation for object oriented software. We present different techniques to overcome the problem of length bloat, and evaluate all possible combinations of these techniques using different search lengths. Experiments on a set of difficult search targets selected from several open source and industrial projects show that the important choice in search-based testing is not the length of test cases, but how to make sure that this length does not become bloated.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{gordonfraser-icst-2011,
title = "It is Not the Length that Matters, It is How You Control It",
author = "Gordon Fraser and Andrea Arcuri",
year = "2011",
month = mar,
booktitle = "Proceedings of the fourth IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and
Validation (ICST 2011)",
location = "Berlin, Germany",
}