Directed Random Testing

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“Directed Random Testing” by Carlos Pacheco. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, (Cambridge, Massachusetts), June 2009.

Abstract

Random testing can quickly generate many tests, is easy to implement, scales to large software applications, and reveals software errors. But it tends to generate many tests that are illegal or that exercise the same parts of the code as other tests, thus limiting its effectiveness. Directed random testing is a new approach to test generation that overcomes these limitations, by combining a bottom-up generation of tests with runtime guidance. A directed random test generator takes a collection of operations under test and generates new tests incrementally, by randomly selecting operations to apply and finding arguments from among previously-constructed tests. As soon as it generates a new test, the generator executes it, and the result determines whether the test is redundant, illegal, error-revealing, or useful for generating more tests. The technique outputs failing tests pointing to potential errors that should be corrected, and passing tests that can be used for regression testing. The thesis also contributes auxiliary techniques that post-process the generated tests, including a simplification technique that transforms a failing test into a smaller one that better isolates the cause of failure, and a branch-directed test generation technique that aims to increase the code coverage achieved by the set of generated tests.

Applied to 14 widely-used libraries (including the Java JDK and the core .NET framework libraries), directed random testing quickly reveals many serious, previously unknown errors in the libraries. And compared with other test generation tools (model checking, symbolic execution, and traditional random testing), it reveals more errors and achieves higher code coverage. In an industrial case study, a test team at Microsoft using the technique discovered in fifteen hours of human effort as many errors as they typically discover in a person-year of effort using other testing methods.

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BibTeX entry:

@phdthesis{PachecoPhD:2009,
   author = {Carlos Pacheco},
   title = {Directed Random Testing},
   school = {MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science},
   type = {{Ph.D.}},
   address = {Cambridge, Massachusetts},
   month = jun,
   year = {2009}
}