skip to main content
10.1145/2330163.2330331acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesgeccoConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Evolutionary algorithm for prioritized pairwise test data generation

Published: 07 July 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Combinatorial Interaction Testing (CIT) is a technique used to discover faults caused by parameter interactions in highly configurable systems. These systems tend to be large and exhaustive testing is generally impractical. Indeed, when the resources are limited, prioritization of test cases is a must. Important test cases are assigned a high priority and should be executed earlier. On the one hand, the prioritization of test cases may reveal faults in early stages of the testing phase. But, on the other hand the generation of minimal test suites that fulfill the demanded coverage criteria is an NP-hard problem. Therefore, search based approaches are required to find the (near) optimal test suites. In this work we present a novel evolutionary algorithm to deal with this problem. The experimental analysis compares five techniques on a set of benchmarks. It reveals that the evolutionary approach is clearly the best in our comparison. The presented algorithm can be integrated into a professional tool for CIT.

References

[1]
S. Amland. Risk-based testing: Risk analysis fundamentals and metrics for software testing including a financial application case study. Journal of Systems and Software, 53(3):287--295, 2000.
[2]
A. Baresel, D. W. Binkley, M. Harman, and B. Korel. Evolutionary testing in the presence of loop-assigned flags: A testability transformation approach. In ISSTA 2004, pages 108--118, 2004.
[3]
Bryce and Memon. Test suite prioritization by interaction coverage. In DOSTA'07, pages 1--7, New York, 2007.
[4]
R. C. Bryce and C. J. Colbourn. Prioritized interaction testing for pair-wise coverage with seeding and constraints. Information and Software Technology, 48(10):960--970, 2006.
[5]
R. C. Bryce and C. J. Colbourn. One-test-at-a-time heuristic search for interaction test suites. In GECCO '07, pages 1082--1089, New York, 2007.
[6]
D. Cohen and Shi. Interaction testing of highly-configurable systems in the presence of constraints. In ISSTA '07, New York,2007. ACM. 594071.
[7]
M. Cohen, J. Snyder, and G. Rothermel. Testing across configurations: implications for combinatorial testing. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes, 31:1--9, November 2006.
[8]
E. D1az, R. Blanco, and J. Tuya. Tabu search for automated loop coverage in software testing. In (ICKEDS'06), pages 229--234, Porto, 2006.
[9]
S. Elbaum, A. Malishevsky, and G. Rothermel. Test case prioritization: a family of empirical studies. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 28(2):159 --182, feb 2002.
[10]
S. Elbaum, G. Rothermel, S. Kanduri, and A. G. Malishevsky. Selecting a cost-effective test case prioritization technique. Software Quality Control, 12:185--210, September 2004.
[11]
M. Grindal, J. Offutt, and S. F. Andler. Combination testing strategies: A survey. Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability, 15:167--199, 2005.
[12]
M. Grochtmann and K. Grimm. Classification trees for partition testing. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 3(2):63--82, 1993.
[13]
M. Harman. The current state and future of search based software engineering. In (ICSE/FOSE '07), pages 342--357, Minneapolis, May 2007.
[14]
M. Harman and B. F. Jones. Search-based software engineering. Information & Software Technology, 43(14):833--839, December 2001.
[15]
Y. X. Jones B, Sthamer H and E. D. The automatic generation of software test data sets using adaptive search techniques. In 3rd International Conference on Software Quality Management, pages 435--444, 1995.
[16]
B. Korel. Automated software test data generation. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 16(8):870--879, 1990.
[17]
R. Kuhn, Y. Lei, and R. Kacker. Practical combinatorial testing: Beyond pairwise. IT Professional, 10:19--23, May 2008.
[18]
C. Y. Lee. Representation of switching circuits by binary-decision programs. Bell System Technical Journal, 38:985:999, July 1959.
[19]
E. Lehmann and J. Wegener. Test case design by means of the cte xl. In EuroSTAR 2000, Kopenhagen, Denmark, December 2000.
[20]
P. McMinn. Search-based software test data generation: a survey. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 14(2):105--156, June 2004.
[21]
W. Miller and D. L. Spooner. Automatic generation of floating-point test data. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 2(3):223--226, 1976.
[22]
T. N. A search-based automated test-data generation framework for safety critical software. Master's thesis, PhD Thesis, University of York, 2000.
[23]
C. Nie and H. Leung. A survey of combinatorial testing. ACM Comput. Surv, 43(2):11, 2011.
[24]
T. J. Ostrand and M. J. Balcer. The category-partition method for specifying and generating fuctional tests. Commun. ACM, 31:676--686, June 1988.
[25]
X. Qu, M. Cohen, and K. Woolf. Combinatorial interaction regression testing: A study of test case generation and prioritization. In ICSM 2007, pages 255--264, oct. 2007.
[26]
E. Salecker, R. Reicherdt, and S. Glesner. Calculating prioritized interaction test sets with constraints using binary decision diagrams. ICSTW '11, pages 278--285, Washington, 2011.
[27]
G. H. Walton, J. H. Poore, and C. J. Trammell. Statistical testing of software based on a usage model. Softw. Pract. Exper., 25:97--108, January 1995.
[28]
Y. Zhan and J. A. Clark. The state problem for test generation in simulink. In GECCO'06:, pages 1941--1948. ACM Press, 2006.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Determining Factors and Correlation of Factors Influential for Student Engagement2024 15th International Conference on Computing Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT)10.1109/ICCCNT61001.2024.10724770(1-6)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Some Seeds Are Strong: Seeding Strategies for Search-based Test Case SelectionACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/353218232:1(1-47)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
  • (2023)A Systematic Literature Review on Test Case Prioritization TechniquesAgile Software Development10.1002/9781119896838.ch7(101-159)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '12: Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
July 2012
1396 pages
ISBN:9781450311779
DOI:10.1145/2330163
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 July 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. combinatorial testing
  2. evolutionary algorithm
  3. pairwise coverage
  4. prioritization
  5. search based software engineering
  6. software testing

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

GECCO '12
Sponsor:
GECCO '12: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
July 7 - 11, 2012
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Determining Factors and Correlation of Factors Influential for Student Engagement2024 15th International Conference on Computing Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT)10.1109/ICCCNT61001.2024.10724770(1-6)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Some Seeds Are Strong: Seeding Strategies for Search-based Test Case SelectionACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/353218232:1(1-47)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
  • (2023)A Systematic Literature Review on Test Case Prioritization TechniquesAgile Software Development10.1002/9781119896838.ch7(101-159)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2023
  • (2021)A Systematic Literature Review on Test Case Prioritization in Combinatorial TestingProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Algorithms, Computing and Systems10.1145/3490700.3490710(55-61)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2021
  • (2020)Seeding strategies for multi-objective test case selectionProceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3377930.3389810(1222-1231)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2020
  • (2018)An automation approach for architecture discovery in software design using genetic algorithmInternational Journal of Computational Science and Engineering10.5555/3292834.329283817:4(390-397)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
  • (2018)A Test Prioritization Algorithm That Cares for "Don't Care" Values and Higher Order Combinatorial CoverageACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/3149485.314951042:4(1-9)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2018
  • (2017)A novel approach for combinatorial test case generation using multi objective optimization2017 7th International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE)10.1109/ICCKE.2017.8167914(411-418)Online publication date: Oct-2017
  • (2017)Combinatorial Test Set Prioritization Using Data Flow TechniquesArabian Journal for Science and Engineering10.1007/s13369-017-2631-y43:2(483-497)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2017
  • (2017)Variability testing in the wildSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-015-0459-z16:1(173-194)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media