Evolutionary test environment for automatic structural testing

Testing is the most significant analytic quality assurance measure for soft ware, Systematic design of test cases is crucial for the test quality. Stru cture-oriented test methods, which define test cases on the basis of the in ternal program structures, are widely used. A promising approach for the au tomation of structural test case design is evolutionary testing. Evolutiona ry testing searches test data that fulfil a given structural test criteria by means of evolutionary computation. In this work, an evolutionary test en vironment has been developed that performs fully automatic test data genera tion for most structural test methods. The introduction of an approximation level for fitness evaluation of generated test data and the definition of an efficient test strategy for processing test goals, increases the perform ance of evolutionary testing considerably. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. A ll rights reserved.