Automated Unit Testing: Developing a prototype for .NET

摘要

A lot of research has been done in the area of automated unit testing on the Java platform, but almost none for the .NET framework. The goals of this project are to create a prototype tool and document the efforts needed in order to create a complete implementation for automated unit testing on the .NET platform. An iterative approach has been used to explore the problem and focus has been put on having a running prototype as early as possible where both testing algorithms (back-end) and the integration with an IDE (front-end) has been priorities. In addition some focus has been put on the combination of random testing and symbolic execution as a test generation technique. The goal creating a functional prototype was never achieved but some important aspects and technical problems associated with automatic test generation for the .NET-platform have been identified. This includes the merit of random testing as a fast and easy to implement test solution, difficulties of creating a plug-in for Visual Studio and most importantly the need for a proper analysis/instrumentation library for CIL code if symbolic execution should be used as a test generation technique.