Resource and dependency based test case generation for RESTful Web services

Abstract Nowadays, RESTful web services are widely used for building enterprise applications. REST is not a protocol, but rather it defines set of guidelines on how to design APIs access and manipulate resources using HTTP over network. In this paper, we propose an enhanced search-based method automated system test generation services, by exploiting domain knowledge the handling resources. The proposed techniques use specific effective templates structure actions (i.e., ordered sequences calls) within individual in evolutionary search. action developed based semantics methods services’ addition, five novel sampling strategies with four resource-based sampling) cases that can one or more these templates. further supported new, specialized mutation operators mutation) search take into account generated cases. Moreover, dependency detect possible dependencies among tested mutations then information detected dependencies. To evaluate our approach, implemented as extension EvoMaster tool, conducted empirical study two selected baselines 7 open-source 12 synthetic services. Results show approach obtains significant improvement performance baselines, e.g., up + 130.7% relative (growing from 27.9% 64.3%) line coverage.