Toward Practical Automated Software Testing

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Toward Practical Automated Software Testing"

by

Miss Mijung KIM


Abstract:

Testing is an important and necessary activity in developing software to gain 
confidence in its behavior, but creating test cases is a laborious and 
time-consuming job to developers. To reduce the manual effort on unit testing, 
tremendous research has been performed on automatic unit test generation based 
on various underlying techniques such as random testing, search-based testing, 
and dynamic symbolic execution. These automated testing tools provide 
developers with a set of failing tests that can possibly detect uncovered 
faults.However, automatically-generated tests are not widely used in practice 
because the inputs of those tests are often invalid by violating the method's 
implicit preconditions and thus fail to reflect the realistic usage scenario of 
the software. Due to the high portion of invalid inputs, test failures tend to 
produce many false alarms rather than revealing real faults.

To tackle this problem, in this thesis, we propose first a technique that 
analyzes failing tests (i.e., test failures) with respect to their likelihood 
of violating the target method's implicit precondition. Failures that are less 
likely to violate implicit preconditions are ranked higher. The likelihood is 
calculated by observing data-flow relationships reaching the crash variable 
whose value leads to a failure both in failing and passing executions. Further, 
we propose a technique that enhances a test suite by generating new test cases 
with valid inputs. The technique leverages existing test cases to mine 
preconditions of methods and uses these preconditions to guide the test 
generation towards valid test inputs.


Date:			Wednesday, 29 November 2017

Time:                  	10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3494
                         (lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Supervisor)
  			Prof. Frederick Lochovsky (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Raymond Wong


**** ALL are Welcome ****