A Platform for Diversity-Driven Test Amplification

Test amplification approaches take a manually written set of tests (input/output mappings) and enhance their effectiveness for some clearly defined engineering goal such as detecting faults. Conceptually, they can either achieve this in a "black box" way using only the initial "seed" tests or in a "white box" way utilizing additional inputs such as the source code or specification of the software under test. However, no fully black box approach to test amplification is currently available even though they can be used to enhance white box approaches. In this paper we introduce a new approach that uses the seed tests to search for existing redundant implementations of the software under test and leverages them as oracles in the generation and evaluation of new tests. The approach can therefore be used as a stand alone black box test amplification method or in tandem with other methods. In this paper we explain the approach, describe its synergies with other approaches and provide some evidence for its practical feasibility.