Automated generation of oracled test cases with regular expressions and combinatorial techniques

摘要

One of the main challenges of software testing research is the automated addition oforacles to the generated test cases: Whereas the automated generation of operationsequences (which is one of the essential components of test cases) is in practice asolved problem, the automated addition of the oracle (another indispensable element)is still an important problem and an open research question. This article proposesan approach to get executable test suites composed by complete test cases(i.e., they include the oracle). The core of the method is based on annotated regularexpressions. The test generation process, which is supported by a tool, follows threesteps: (1) creation of annotated regular expressions, where each regular expressiondescribes a set of sequences of operations to be executed against the system undertest; (2) expansion of the regular expressions to get sequences of operations, whichstill do not have parameter values; and (3) generation of the executable test caseswith oracle. In this third step, each test case is generated with the suitable oracle,depending on the conditions specified in the regular expression.