Applying search in an automatic contract-based testing tool

• Main Authors: KOLESNICHENKO, Alexey, POSKITT, Christopher M., MEYER, Bertrand
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Theory and Algorithms
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4915; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5918/viewcontent/KolesnichenkoPoskittMeyer.SSBSE.2013.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Automated random testing has been shown to be effective at finding faults in a variety of contexts and is deployed in several testing frameworks. AutoTest is one such framework, targeting programs written in Eiffel, an object-oriented language natively supporting executable pre- and postconditions; these respectively serving as test filters and test oracles. In this paper, we propose the integration of search-based techniques—along the lines of Tracey—to try and guide the tool towards input data that leads to violations of the postconditions present in the code; input data that random testing alone might miss, or take longer to find. Furthermore, we propose to minimise the performance impact of this extension by applying GPU programming to amenable parts of the computation.