AUTOMATIC TEST-DATA GENERATION FOR MODIFIED CONDITION/ DECISION COVERAGE USING GENETIC ALGORITHM

One area where SBSE has seen much application is test data generation. Search based test data generation techniques have been applied to automatically generate data for testing functional and nonfunctional properties of software. For structural testing, most of the time the criterion used is branch coverage. However, a single criterion is not enough for effective testing. For the wider acceptance of search based test data generation techniques, much stronger criteria like MCDC is needed. Structural testing provides confidence in the correct functioning of the software in its intended environment. Experiments have been performed using simulated annealing to generate test data for simple programs and the parameters of simulated annealing have been optimized through a small set of experiments. This concept can be extended further to include other search based algorithms and to test programs with difficult branching structures. Comparisons are made with the results obtained from genetic algorithm versus random testing. The experimental results show that the generated test cases give a higher structural coverage such as condition, statement, MCDC and multiple condition coverage.