A New Approach for Assertions Processing during Assertion-Based Software Testing

Assertion-Based software testing has been shown to
be a promising tool for generating test cases that reveal program
faults. Because the number of assertions may be very large for
industry-size programs, one of the main concerns to the applicability
of assertion-based testing is the amount of search time required to
explore a large number of assertions. This paper presents a new
approach for assertions exploration during the process of Assertion-
Based software testing. Our initial exterminations with the proposed
approach show that the performance of Assertion-Based testing may
be improved, therefore, making this approach more efficient when
applied on programs with large number of assertions.


Authors:



References:
[1] C. Ramamoorthy, S. Ho, W. Chen, “On the Automated Generation of
Program Test Data,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 2,
No. 4, 1976, pp. 293-300.
[2] B. Jones, H. Sthamer, D. Eyres, “Automatic Structural Testing Using
Genetic Algorithms,” Software Eng. Journal, 11(5), 1996, pp.299-306.
[3] B. Korel, “Automated Test Data Generation,” IEEE Transactions on
Software Engineering, vol. 16, No. 8, 1990, pp. 870-879.
[4] B. Korel, “Dynamic Method for Software Test Data Generation,”
Journal of Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability, vol. 2, 1992,
pp. 203-213.
[5] B. Korel, “TESTGEN – An Execution-Oriented Test Data Generation
System,” Technical Report TR-SE-95-01, Dept. of Computer Science,
Illinois Institute of Technology, 1995.
[6] B. Korel, A. Al-Yami “Assertion-Oriented Automated Test Data
Generation,” Proc. 18th Intern. Conference on Software Eng., Berlin,
Germany, 1996, pp. 701-80.
[7] B. Korel, , Q. Zhang, L. Tao, “Assertion-Based Validation of Modified
Programs,” Proc. 2009 2nd Intern. Conference on Software Testing,
Verification and Validation, Denver, USA, 2009, pp. 426-435.
[8] Ali M. Alakeel, "Using Fuzzy Logic in Test Case Prioritization for
Regression Testing Programs with Assertions," The Scientific World
Journal, vol. 2014, Article ID 316014, 9 pages, 2014.
doi:10.1155/2014/316014.
[9] C. Michael, G. Mcgraw, M. Schatz., “Generating Software Test Data by
Evolution,” IEEE Tran. on Software Engineering, 27(12), 2001, pp.
1085-1110.
[10] D. Bird, C. Munoz, “Automatic Generation of Random Self-Checking
Test Cases,” IBM Systems Journal, vol. 22, No. 3, 1982, pp. 229-245.
[11] D. Rosenblum, “Toward A Method of Programming With Assertions,”
Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering,
1992, pp. 92-104.
[12] G. Myers, “The Art of Software Testing,” John Wiley & Sons, New
York, 1979.
[13] Ali M. Alakeel, “A Testability Transformation Approach for Programs
with Assertions,” Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on
Advances in System Testing and Validation Lifecycle, Nice, France, pp.
9-13, October 2014.
[14] Ali M. Alakeel, “Intelligent Assertions Placement Scheme for String
Search Algorithms,” Proceedings of the Second International
Conference on Intelligent Systems and Applications, Venice, Italy, pp.
122-128, April 2013.
[15] J. Wegener, A. Baresel, H. Sthamer, “Evolutionary Test Environment for
Automatic Structural Testing,” Information and Software Technology,
43, 2001, pp. 841-854.
[16] L. Clarke, “A System to Generate Test Data and Symbolically Execute
Programs,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 2, No. 3,
1976, pp. 215-222.
[17] Ali M. Alakeel, "Assertion-Based Software Testing Metrics Approach
Based on Fuzzy Logic," Proceedings of the 22nd International
Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE–
2013), Los Angeles, California, USA, pp. 9-12, September 2013.
[18] P. Mcminn, M. Holcombo, “The State Problem for Evolutionary
Testing,” Proc. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference,
2003, pp. 2488-2498.
[19] R. Boyer, B. Elspas, K. Levitt, ”SELECT - A Formal System for Testing
and Debugging Programs By Symbolic Execution,“ SIGPLAN Notices,
vol. 10, No. 6, 1975, pp. 234-245.
[20] R. DeMillo, A. Offutt, “Constraint-Based Automatic Test Data
Generation,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 17, No.
9, 1991, pp. 900-910.
[21] R. Ferguson, B. Korel, “Chaining Approach for Automated Test Data
Generation,” ACM Tran. on Software Eng. and Methodology, (5)1,
1996, pp.63-68.
[22] R. Pargas, M. Harrold, R. Peck, “Test Data Generation Using Genetic
Algorithms,” Journal of Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability,
9, 1999, pp. 263-282.
[23] S. Yau, R. Cheung, “Design of Self-Checking Software,” Proceedings of
the International Conference on Reliable Software, 1975, pp. 450-457.
[24] N. Levenson, S. Cha, J Knight, T. Shimeall, “The Use of Self Checks
and Voting in Software Error Detection: An empirical study,” IEEE
Trans. on Software Eng., 16(4), 1990, pp. 432-443.