2022/04/12 by Fabiano Pecorelli, Pecorelli, Fabiano, Giovanni Grano +7
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software Reliability and Analysis Research #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.05561
openalex publication_date 2022/04/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Unit testing verifies the presence of faults in individual software components. Previous research has been targeting the automatic generation of unit tests through the adoption of random or search-based algorithms. Despite their effectiveness, these approaches do not implement any strategy that allows them to create unit tests in a structured manner: indeed, they aim at creating tests by optimizing metrics like code coverage without ensuring that the resulting tests follow good design principles. In order to structure the automatic test case generation process, we propose a two-step systematic approach to the generation of unit tests: we first force search-based algorithms to create tests that cover individual methods of the production code, hence implementing the so-called intra-method tests; then, we relax the constraints to enable the creation of intra-class tests that target the interactions among production code methods.