Coverage-Based Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming Generation of Test Suites

Software testing is fundamental to ensure the reliability of software. To properly test software, it is critical to generate test suites with high fault finding ability. We propose a new method to generate such test suites: a coverage-based grammar-guide genetic programming algorithm. This evolutionary computation based method allows us to generate test suites that conform with respect to a specification of the system under test using the coverage of such test suites as a guide. We considered scenarios for both black-box testing and white-box testing, depending on the different criteria we work with at each situation. Our experiments show that our proposed method outperforms other baseline methods, both in performance and execution time.