An Open-Source Tool for Automated Generation of Black-Box xUnit Test Code and Its Industrial Evaluation

摘要

The body of knowledge in the area of black-box unit testing is quite well established, e.g., the concepts of category partitioning, boundary value analysis, and pair-wise testing. However, tool support to apply the existing techniques in large-scale industrial software projects is fairly limited. Although tools such as HexaWise enable testers in automatic generation of all-combination pair-wise test input data, nevertheless converting them to actual test case source code (e.g., in NUnit) is both very tedious and also error prone. To address the above challenge, we have developed an open-source tool, referred to as AutoBBUT, for automated generation of black-box NUnit test cases for the C# .Net platform. Evaluation of the tool in an industrial setting by using it to automatically generate more than 1,962 NUnit test cases (having 15,906 test line of code) in NUnit shows the effectiveness of the tool in saving testers a lot of time and also preventing unwanted defects and/or test smells in test code, which can occur due to manual test code development.