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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Branch Coverage Prediction in Automated Testing
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Giovanni Grano
  • Timofey V Titov
  • Sebastiano Panichella
  • Harald C Gall
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Journal of Software: Evolution and Process
Publisher Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 2047-7481
Volume 31
Number 9
Page Range 1 - 22
Date 2019
Abstract Text Software testing is crucial in continuous integration (CI). Ideally, at every commit, all the test cases should be executed and, moreover, new test cases should be generated for the new source code.This is especially true in a Continuous Test Generation (CTG) environment, where the automatic generation of test cases is integrated into the continuous integration pipeline. In this context, developers want to achieve a certain minimum level of coverage for every software build. However, executing all the test cases and, moreover, generating new ones for all the classes at every commit is not feasible. As a consequence, developers have to select which subset of classes has to be tested and/or targeted by test-case generation.We argue that knowing a priori the branch-coverage that can be achieved with test-data generation tools can help developers into taking informed-decision about those issues. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to use source-code metricsto predict the coverage achieved by test-data generation tools. We use four different categories of source-code features and assess the prediction on a large dataset involving more than 3'000 Java classes. We compare different machine learning algorithms and conduct a fine-grained feature analysis aimed at investigating the factors that most impact the prediction accuracy. Moreover, we extend our investigation to four different search-budgets. Our evaluation shows that the best model achieves an average 0.15 and 0.21 MAE on nested cross-validation over the different budgets, respectively on EvoSuite and Randoop. Finally, the discussion of the results demonstrate the relevance of coupling-related features for the prediction accuracy.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1002/smr.2158
Other Identification Number merlin-id:17662
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