Using Genetic Algorithms and Dominance Concepts for Generating Reduced Test Data

Testing takes a considerable amount of the time and resources that are spent on producing software. Testing accounts for approximately 50% of the cost of the development of a software system. Therefore, techniques to reduce the cost of testing would be useful. This paper presents an automatic test-data generation technique that uses a genetic algorithm (GA). This technique applies the concepts of dominance relations between nodes to reduce the cost of software testing. These concepts are used to define a new fitness function to evaluate the generated test data. Finally, the paper presents the results of the experiments that have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GA technique compared to the random testing (RT) technique. These experiments are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the new fitness function and the technique used to reduce the cost of software testing.