RE-COST: REducing the Cost of Oracles for Software Testing

Lead Research Organisation: University of Sheffield
Department Name: Computer Science

Abstract

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Publications

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Afshan S (2013) Evolving Readable String Test Inputs Using a Natural Language Model to Reduce Human Oracle Cost

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Anand S (2013) An orchestrated survey of methodologies for automated software test case generation in Journal of Systems and Software

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Baars A (2011) Symbolic search-based testing

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Barr E (2015) The Oracle Problem in Software Testing: A Survey in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

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Fraser G (2013) Does automated white-box test generation really help software testers?

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Fraser G (2013) Test suite generation with memetic algorithms

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Fraser G (2015) Does Automated Unit Test Generation Really Help Software Testers? A Controlled Empirical Study in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

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Fraser G (2015) A Memetic Algorithm for whole test suite generation in Journal of Systems and Software

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Hall M (2014) Establishing the Source Code Disruption Caused by Automated Remodularisation Tools

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Kapfhammer G (2013) Search-Based Testing of Relational Schema Integrity Constraints Across Multiple Database Management Systems

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Kempka J (2015) Design and analysis of different alternating variable searches for search-based software testing in Theoretical Computer Science

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Kempka J (2013) A theoretical runtime and empirical analysis of different alternating variable searches for search-based testing

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McMinn P (2012) Search-Based Test Input Generation for String Data Types Using the Results of Web Queries

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McMinn P (2012) Input Domain Reduction through Irrelevant Variable Removal and Its Effect on Local, Global, and Hybrid Search-Based Structural Test Data Generation in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

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Mcminn P (2015) The Effectiveness of Test Coverage Criteria for Relational Database Schema Integrity Constraints in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

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Shahbaz M (2012) Automated Discovery of Valid Test Strings from the Web Using Dynamic Regular Expressions Collation and Natural Language Processing

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Shahbaz M (2015) Automatic generation of valid and invalid test data for string validation routines using web searches and regular expressions in Science of Computer Programming

 
Description 1) Readability of automatically-generated test inputs is key when it comes to users of automatic test input generation tools in practice.

2) The readability of automatically-generated string test inputs can be improved, lowering the time needed for humans to check the corresponding outputs to those inputs, in particular through:

a) strings sourced from the Internet.

b) through combining meta-heuristic algorithms with statistical natural language models

3) That the costs of generating test data can be reduced by combining symbolic execution with search based test data generation

4) That the success rate of test data generation for Java programs may be improved when Memetic algorithms are used.
Exploitation Route The research can be used by companies that develop software testing tools. The test data generated by those tools may be made more realistic and human-readable, thus reducing costs of testing for the tool users.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)