Cooperative Test-Case Generation with Verifiers

Abstract

Software testing is widely applied in software quality assurance. Often, test suites fulfilling a certain coverage measure must be constructed. Manually constructing them is laborious. However, numerous automatic test-generation approaches exist. Due to various strengths and weaknesses of individual approaches, hybrid approaches, which combine different approaches, construct test suites that achieve higher coverage values than test suites generated by individual approaches.

We propose the hybrid test-generation approach CoVeriTest. CoVeriTest is flexible, cooperative, and based on verification technology. It iteratively executes a sequence of verifiers that may exchange analysis information between each other and output a test case whenever they reach a test goal. The verifiers, their individual time limits, and which analysis information is exchanged between them is configurable. We experimented with different CoVeriTest configurations. The best configuration participated in the 1st International Competition on Software Testing (Test-Comp’19) and won the third place. This proves the value of our CoVeriTest approach.