Papers 2013
A Case Study on Automated Source-Code-Based Testing Methods
Date | 14 May 2013 - 17 May 2013 |
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Event | DASIA 2013 |
Location | Porto, Portugal |
We present results of a case study on a test
generation approach called Flow-optimized Automated
Source-code-based unit Testing (FAST) which generates test
stimuli from information available in the source code, in
particular taken from the detailed software interfaces. This
allows automation of a significant part of testing, ranging from
the test stimuli generation to the generation of the test report.
A huge number of stimuli can be generated exploring the
behaviour of the software under test under nominal and non-
nominal conditions. Symptoms like timeouts, unexpected
termination, run-time exceptions, out-of-range conditions and
missing coverage are applied for defect detection. The goal of
this study was to evaluate the FAST process in context of a real
spacecraft flight software application and to get a feedback on
its scalability regarding larger applications, its sensitivity on
detecting defects in the code, the achievable test coverage, its
compliance with software standards and potential limitations.
We also consider the impact of coding style on suitability for
automated testing. The results confirm that the approach (1)
provides acceptable code coverage results without requiring
manual intervention for test preparation and execution, (2)
raises the probability of activation of exotic fault conditions,
(3) may provide hints on locations in the code where
robustness needs to be verified, and (4) identifies defects not
found before by static analysis and intensive testing
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