FSX: fine grained incremental unit test generation for C/C+ programs
Automated unit test generation bears the promise of significantly reducing test cost and hence improving software quality. However, the maintenance cost of the automatically generated tests presents a significant barrier to adoption of this technology. To address this challenge, we propose a novel technique for automated and fine grained incremental generation of unit tests through minimal augmentation of an existing test suite. The technique uses iterative, incremental refinement of test drivers and symbolic execution, guided by a diagnostics engine. The diagnostics engine works off a novel precise and efficient byte level dynamic dependence analysis built using Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (ROBDDs) We present a tool FSX implementing this technique and evaluate it under two practical use cases of incremental unit test generation, on five revisions of the open source software iPerf, as well as on 3 large subjects, comprising more than 60 thousand lines of code, from in house commercial network products. The evaluation shows that FSX can generate high quality unit tests on large industrial software while minimizing the maintenance cost of the overall test suite.
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