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The Effectiveness of T-Way Test Data Generation

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Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study comparing the effectiveness of automatically generated tests constructed using random and t-way combinatorial techniques on safety related industrial code using mutation adequacy criteria. A reference point is provided by hand generated test vectors constructed during development to establish minimum acceptance criteria. The study shows that 2-way testing is not adequate measured by mutants kill rate compared with hand generated test set of similar size, but that higher factor t-way test sets can perform at least as well. To reduce the computation overhead of testing large numbers of vectors over large numbers of mutants a staged optimising approach to applying t-way tests is proposed and evaluated which shows improvements in execution time and final test set size.

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Ellims, M., Ince, D., Petre, M. (2008). The Effectiveness of T-Way Test Data Generation. In: Harrison, M.D., Sujan, MA. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5219. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87698-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87698-4_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

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