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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Duran, J., Ntafos, S.: An Evaluation of Random Testing. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 10(4), 438–444 (1984)
Gallagher, M.J., Narasimhan, V.L.: ADTEST: A Test Data Generation Suite for Ada Software Systems. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 23(8), 473–484 (1997)
Cohen, D.M., et al.: The AETG System: An Approach to Testing Based on Combinatorial Design. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 23(7), 437–444 (1997)
Diamond, W.J.: Practical Experiment Design For Engineers and Scientists. John Wiley & Sons, New York (2001)
Mandl, R.: Orthogonal Latin Squares: an Application of Experiment Design to Compiler Testing. Commun. ACM 28(10), 1054–1058 (1985)
Sherwood, G.: Effective Testing of Factor Combinations. In: Third Int’l Conf. Software Testing, Analysis and Review, Software Quality Eng. pp. 151–166 (1994)
Brownlie, R., Prowse, J., Phadke, M.S.: Robust Testing of AT&T PMX/StarMAIL Using Oats. AT&T Technical Journal 71(3), 41–47 (1992)
Cohen, D.M., et al.: The Automatic Efficient Test Generator (AETG) System. In: Proceedings 5th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pp. 303–309. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1994)
Dalal, S., et al.: Model-based Testing of a Highly Programmable System. In: Proc. of the Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1998)
Dalal, S.R., et al.: Model-based Testing in Practice. In: Proc. of the 21st Int’l Conf. on Software Engineering, pp. 285–294. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1999)
Smith, B., Feather, M.S., Muscettola, N.: Challenges and Methods in Testing the Remote Agent Planner. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems, pp. 254–263. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2000)
Wallace, D.R., Kuhn, D.R.: Failure Modes in medical device software: an analysis of 15 years of recall data. International Journal of Reliability, Quality and Safety Engineering 8(4), 351–371 (2001)
Kuhn, D.R., Reilly, M.J.: An Investigation of the Applicability of Design of Experiments to Software Testing. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual NASA Goddard Software Engineering Workshop (SEW-27 2002). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2002)
Kuhn, D.R., Wallace, D.R., Gallo, A.M.: Software Fault Interactions and Implications for Software Testing. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 30(6), 418–421 (2004)
Dunietz, I.S., et al.: Applying Design of Experiments to Software Testing: Experience Report. In: Proc.of the 19th Int’l Conf. on Software Eng., pp. 205–215. ACM Press, New York (1997)
Nair, V.N., et al.: A Statistical Assessment of some Software Testing Strategies and Application of Experimental Design Techniques. Statistica Sinica 8, 165–184 (1998)
Kobayashi, N., Tsuchiya, T., Kikuno, T.: Non-Specification-Based Approaches to Logic Testing for Software. Information and Software Technology 44(2), 113–121 (2002)
Schroeder, P.J., Bolaki, P., Gopu, V.: Comparing the Fault Detection Effectiveness of N-way and Random Test Suites. In: ISESE 2004: Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, pp. 49–59. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2004)
Grindal, M., et al.: An Evaluation of Combination Strategies for Test Case Selection, in Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, University of Skövde (2003)
Malaiya, Y.K.: Antirandom testing: getting the most out of black-box testing. In: Proceedings, Sixth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pp. 86–95 (1995)
Hamlet, R.G.: Testing Programs with the Aid of a Compiler. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 3(4), 279–290 (1977)
DeMillo, R.A., Lipton, R.J., Sayward, F.G.: Hints on Test Data Selection: Help for the Practising Programmer. Computer, 34–41 (1978)
Daran, M., Thevenod-Fosse, P.: Software Error Analysis: a Real Case Study Involving Real Faults and Mutations. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 21(3), 158–171 (1996)
Frankl, P.G., Weiss, S.N., and Hu, C.: All-uses vs. mutation testing: an experimental comparison of effectiveness. J. Syst. Softw. 38(3), 235–253 (1997)
Zhan, Y., Clark, J.A.: Search-Based Mutation Testing for Simulink Models. In: Proc. of the 2005 Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pp. 1061–1068. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Offutt, A.J., Voas, J.M.: Subsumption of Condition Coverage Techniques by Mutation Testing, in Tech. Report, Dept. of Information and Software Systems Engineering, George Mason Univ., Fairfax, Va (1996)
Andrews, J.H., Briand, L.C., Labiche, Y.: Is Mutation an Appropriate Tool for Test Experiments? In: Proc. of the 27th Int’l Conf. on Software Engineering, pp. 402–411. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Anon.: Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable electronic safety-related systems, Part 1: General Requirements, BS EN 61508-1:2002, British Standards (2002)
Woodward, M.R., Hedley, D., Hennel, M.A.: Experience with Path Analysis and Testing of Programs. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 6(6), 228–278 (1980)
Ellims, M., Bridges, J., Ince, D.C.: The Economics of Unit Testing. Empirical Softw. Eng. 11(1), 5–31 (2006)
Ellims, M., Ince, D., Petre, M.: The Csaw C Mutation Tool: Initial Results. In: Mutation 2007. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2007)
Lei, Y., et al.: IPOG: A General Strategy for T-Way Software Testing. In: 14th Annual IEEE Int’l Conf. and Workshops on the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems (ECBS 2007), pp. 549–556. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2007)
Jenny (accessed June 2007), http://www.burtleburtle.net/bob/math
Michael, C.C., McGraw, G., Schatz, M.A.: Generating Software Test Data by Evolution. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 27(12), 1085–1110 (2001)
Wichmann, B.A., Hill, I.D.: Generating Good Pseudo-Random Numbers. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 51(3), 1614–1622 (2006)
Ammann, P.E., Offutt, J.: Using Formal Methods to Derive Test Frames in Category-Partition Testing. In: Proc. of 9th Annual Conf. on Computer Assurance (COMPASS 1994), pp. 824–830. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1994)
Offutt, A.J.: A Practical System for Mutation Testing: Help for the Common Programmer. In: Proc. of the IEEE Int’l Test Conference on TEST: The Next 25 Years, pp. 824–830. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1994)
Offutt, J.A., Pan, J., Voas, J.M.: Procedures for Reducing the Size of Coverage Based Test Sets. In: Twelfth Int. Conf. on Testing Computer Software, pp. 111–123 (1995)
Bottaci, L.: Instrumenting Programs with Flag Variables for Test Data Search by Genetic Algorithms. In: Proc. of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (2002)
Gotlieb, A.: Exploiting Symmetries to Test Programs. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, p. 365. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2003)
Offutt, A.J., et al.: An Experimental Determination of Sufficient Mutant Operators. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 5(2), 99–118 (1996)
Dillon, E., Meudec, C.: Automatic Test Data Generation from Embedded C Code. In: Heisel, M., Liggesmeyer, P., Wittmann, S. (eds.) SAFECOMP 2004. LNCS, vol. 3219, pp. 180–194. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Copeland, L.: A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design. Artech House Publishers, Boston (2004)
Ellims, M.: The Csaw Mutation Tool Users Guide, in Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, Open University (2007)
Ellims, M., Ince, D., Petre, M.: AETG vs. Man: an Assessment of the Effectiveness of Combinatorial Test Data Generation, in Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, Open University (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87698-4_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-87697-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-87698-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)