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“Combined static and dynamic automated test generation” by Sai Zhang, David Saff, Yingyi Bu, and Michael D. Ernst. In ISSTA 2011, Proceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, (Toronto, Canada), July 2011, pp. 353-363.
In an object-oriented program, a unit test often consists of a sequence of method calls that create and mutate objects, then use them as arguments to a method under test. It is challenging to automatically generate sequences that are legal and behaviorally-diverse, that is, reaching as many different program states as possible.
This paper proposes a combined static and dynamic automated test generation approach to address these problems, for code without a formal specification. Our approach first uses dynamic analysis to infer a call sequence model from a sample execution, then uses static analysis to identify method dependence relations based on the fields they may read or write. Finally, both the dynamically-inferred model (which tends to be accurate but incomplete) and the statically-identified dependence information (which tends to be conservative) guide a random test generator to create legal and behaviorally-diverse tests.
Our Palus tool implements this testing approach. We compared its effectiveness with a pure random approach, a dynamic-random approach (without a static phase), and a static-random approach (without a dynamic phase) on several popular open-source Java programs. Tests generated by Palus achieved higher structural coverage and found more bugs.
Palus is also internally used in Google. It has found 22 previously-unknown bugs in four well-tested Google products.
Download: PDF, slides (PDF), slides (PowerPoint), implementation.
BibTeX entry:
@inproceedings{ZhangSBE2011,
author = {Sai Zhang and David Saff and Yingyi Bu and Michael D. Ernst},
title = {Combined static and dynamic automated test generation},
booktitle = {ISSTA 2011, Proceedings of the 2011 International
Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis},
pages = {353--363},
address = {Toronto, Canada},
month = jul,
year = {2011}
}
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