TY - JOUR
T1 - Intelligent evaluation of test suites for developing efficient and reliable software
AU - Mohammadian, Masoud
AU - Javed, Zafer
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Test suites play an important role in developing reliable software applications. Generally, the behaviour of software applications is verified by executing test suites to find defects. The quality of a test suite needs to be evaluated and enriched (if needed) especially for testing critical systems, such as plane-navigation system. This paper presents a novel method for comparing concrete and executable test suites using equivalence classes. This comparison identifies gaps in test suites with respect to each other. These gaps indicate potential weaknesses in the test suites. Furthermore, this method provides a mechanism to enrich the test suites using these gaps. In this method, we devise equivalence classes, and associate each test case to an equivalence class. We, then, simulate the comparison of test suites by comparing sets of equivalence classes. The method compares test suites in a platform independent manner. The test suites, which are compared, are smaller than the original test suites because the redundant test cases are removed from the test suites, which makes it efficient. We exercise our method over three case studies to demonstrate its viability and effectiveness. The first case study illustrates the application of the method and evaluates its effectiveness using a mutation analysis. The second case study evaluates its effectiveness using mutation and coverage analyses. The final case study evaluates it on a real case study, which is Lucene search engine.
AB - Test suites play an important role in developing reliable software applications. Generally, the behaviour of software applications is verified by executing test suites to find defects. The quality of a test suite needs to be evaluated and enriched (if needed) especially for testing critical systems, such as plane-navigation system. This paper presents a novel method for comparing concrete and executable test suites using equivalence classes. This comparison identifies gaps in test suites with respect to each other. These gaps indicate potential weaknesses in the test suites. Furthermore, this method provides a mechanism to enrich the test suites using these gaps. In this method, we devise equivalence classes, and associate each test case to an equivalence class. We, then, simulate the comparison of test suites by comparing sets of equivalence classes. The method compares test suites in a platform independent manner. The test suites, which are compared, are smaller than the original test suites because the redundant test cases are removed from the test suites, which makes it efficient. We exercise our method over three case studies to demonstrate its viability and effectiveness. The first case study illustrates the application of the method and evaluates its effectiveness using a mutation analysis. The second case study evaluates its effectiveness using mutation and coverage analyses. The final case study evaluates it on a real case study, which is Lucene search engine.
KW - extending test adequacy
KW - quality of testing
KW - Test adequacy
KW - test suite comparison
KW - test suite enrichment
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85076103949&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/3f89bc15-4e07-3a08-9612-717590a9827e/
U2 - 10.1080/17445760.2019.1696342
DO - 10.1080/17445760.2019.1696342
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076103949
SN - 1744-5760
VL - 36
SP - 159
EP - 188
JO - International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems
JF - International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems
IS - 2
ER -