An automated framework for structural test-data generation

Structural testing criteria are mandated in many software development standards and guidelines. The process of generating test-data to achieve 100% coverage of a given structural coverage metric is labour intensive and expensive. This paper presents an approach to automate the generation of such lest-data. The test-data generation is based on the application of a dynamic optimisation-based search for the required test-data. The same approach cast be generalised to solve other test-data generation problems. Three such applications are discussed - boundary value analysis, assertion/run-time exception testing and component re-use testing. A prototype tool-set has been developed to facilitate the automatic generation of test-data for these structural testing problems. The results of preliminary experiments using this technique and the prototype tool-set are presented and show the efficiently and effectiveness of this approach.