An evolutionary approach for performing structural unit-testing on third-party object-oriented Java software

Abstract

Evolutionary Testing is an emerging methodology for automatically generating high quality test data. The focus of this paper is on presenting an approach for generating test cases for the unit-testing of object-oriented programs, with basis on the information provided by the structural analysis and interpretation of Java bytecode and on the dynamic execution of the instrumented test object. The rationale for working at the bytecode level is that even when the source code is unavailable, insight can still be obtained and used to guide the search-based test case generation process. Test cases are represented using the Strongly Typed Genetic Programming paradigm, which effectively mimics the polymorphic relationships, inheritance dependences and method argument constraints of object-oriented programs.