Capture-based Automated Test Input Generation

Testing object-oriented software is critical because object-oriented languages have been commonly used in developing modern software systems. Many efficient test input generation techniques for object-oriented software have been proposed; however, stateof-the-art algorithms yield very low code coverage (e.g., less than 50%) on large-scale software. Therefore, one important and yet challenging problem is to generate desirable input objects for receivers and arguments that can achieve high code coverage (such as branch coverage) or help reveal bugs. Desirable objects help tests exercise the new parts of the code. However, generating desirable objects has been a significant challenge for automated test input generation tools, partly because the search space for such desirable objects is huge. To address this significant challenge, we propose a novel approach called Capturebased Automated Test Input Generation for Objected-Oriented Unit Testing (CAPTIG). The contributions of this proposed research are the following. First, CAPTIG enhances method-sequence generation techniques. Our approach introduces a set of new algorithms for guided input and method selection that increase code coverage. In addition, CAPTIG efficently reduces the amount of generated input. Second, CAPTIG captures objects dynamically from program execution during either system testing or real use. These captured inputs can support existing automated test input generation tools, such as a random testing tool called Randoop, to achieve higher code coverage.