Automated test case generation based on differential evolution with node branch archive

Automatic test case generation (ATCG) is the active research topic in software testing engineering, which can greatly reduce the cost of software testing. In automated test case generation for path coverage (ATCG-PC) problem, since the relationship between test cases and paths is unknown, there are many redundant test cases in the test case set to meet the path coverage criteria. In many previous studies on search-based algorithms for ATCG-PC, researchers have focused on improving the search-based algorithms itself or designing a more suitable fitness function according to the coverage criteria. However, the relationship between test cases and paths can help search-based algorithms cover more paths. The values of some specific test case dimensions change, and offspring individuals may cover different paths. Inspired by this, we proposed a node branch archive strategy, which can record the relationship between node branch direction and the value of test case variables, and cover more paths through this driven search-based algorithms. The experimental results show that compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms, the differential evolution with node branch archive (NBAr-DE) can significantly reduce the number of redundant test cases.