Effective code coverage in compositional systematic dynamic testing

Recently automated test generation tools that implement variations of symbolic execution technology have demonstrated their ability to find subtle errors. However, one challenge they all face is how to effectively handle the exponential number of paths in large, realistic programs. This paper presents Directed Systematic Dynamic Testing approach, or DSDT for short, that combines compositional systematic dynamic testing with a search heuristic based on block-coverage. The approach tests program under test compositionally and directs the path exploration along the program point with the lowest block-coverage. We implemented our algorithm on top of jFuzz for testing Java program and evaluated our approach on testing a Java implementation of red-black tree. The preliminary experimental results show that Directed Systematic Dynamic Testing approach can efficiently achieve the code coverage of program under test. © 2011 IEEE.