A Fitness Function to Find Feasible Sequences of Method Callsfor Evolutionary Testing of Object-Oriented Programs(An Extended Abstract)

摘要

In evolutionary testing of an object-oriented program,the search objective is to find a sequence of method callsthat can successfully produce a test object of an interestingstate. This is challenging because not all call sequences arefeasible; each call of a sequence has to meet the assumptionof the called method. The effectiveness of an evolutionarytesting thus depends in part on the quality of the so-calledfitness function that determines the degree of the fitness of acandidate solution. In this paper, we propose a new fitnessfunction based on assertions such as method preconditionsto find feasible sequences of method calls. We show throughexperiments that to obtain the best search result the fitnessfunction should consider the structures of method call se-quences, which are essentially trees of assertions. We alsoprovide a framework for combining multiple fitness valuesand for analyzing different fitness functions.