Genetic Algorithm for Automatic Generation of Representative Test Suite for Mutation Testing

Discovering bugs in software towards quality of software is given paramount importance in research arena. Towards this end automatic test case generation became essential as manual test data generation and adding test oracles is tedious task. It is more so when there are no formal specifications to unearth the faults in test outcome. Therefore, it is important to generate representative test sets that ensure complete code coverage. Genetic Algorithms are proved to be very useful for generation of unit tests and well suited for testing object oriented software systems. They are well known for their capabilities to test complex objects through sequences of method invocations. In this paper we used genetic algorithm for generating representative test suite for mutation testing. We built a tool that demonstrates the proof of concept. The empirical results are encouraging.