Abstract:

In black-box testing, a possible choice for test data generation is to derive test data from interface constraints using some constraint solving techniques. However, directly performing constraint solving to the whole constraint formula may not be able to fully leverage the information embodied in a constraint. Thus, it is difficult to obtain a high coverage test set. For example, when solving a constraint (a > 0 or b < 0) in a whole, we cannot guarantee that data covering sub-constraint b < 0 will be involved in the test set. To address the problem, in this paper, we firstly define a hierarchy of coverage criteria at the specification constraint level. Then, algorithms are designed to decompose constraints according to such coverage criteria and to generate test input sets. The experiments on a set of benchmark programs show that decomposing constraints according to constraint-level coverage criteria does effectively lead to better coverage in test data generation.