Heuristic search-based approach for automated test data generation: a survey

摘要

The complexity of software has been increasing in the past few years, and software testing as a most intensive factor is becoming more and more expensive. Testing costs often account for up to 50% of the total expense of software project development;hence any techniques leading to the automatic test data generation will have great potential to substantially reduce these costs. Existing approaches of automatic test data generation have achieved some success by using heuristic search-based approach, but they are not summarised. In this paper we presented a survey on heuristic search-based approach, i.e., genetic algorithm for automated test data generation. We summarise the work done by researchers those who have applied the concept of heuristic search-based approach for test data generation. The main objective of this paper is to acquire the concepts related to heuristic search-based approach for automated test data generation and moreover the use of heuristic search-based approach fascinated by the fact that many of the testing problems can be formulated as search problem. We also provide constructive guidelines for future research for automated test data generation.