An Efficient Slicing Approach for Test Case Generation

Automated test data generation is a challenging task in software engineering research. Despite all the advancement, software testing continues to be the most time and resource consuming aspect of software development. One aspect of Automated Testing is generation of test data for each predicate involved in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagram of the modeled software. The test data generation also needs to consider the dependencies of each predicate on other constraints in the model. In this paper, a new algorithm called Slicing_for_Testcase_Generation (STCG), based on slicing, is proposed for automatic test data generation. Our approach is based on construction of sets by considering the program dependencies which is more efficient compared to the traditional path approach. Depending upon the program dependencies for a given predicate, we obtain a slice for it i.e., for a given model and predicate our approach efficiently generates test cases by considering only the relevant constraints present in the model. The implementation of our approach is presented and experiments were carried out for various UML diagrams. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach is an efficient one than the traditional path approach.