Artificial Intelligence Applied to Software Testing: A Literature Review

Abstract

In the last few years Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and Machine Learning (ML) approaches have been successfully applied in real-world scenarios like commerce, industry and digital services, but they are not a widespread reality in Software Testing. Due to the complexity of software testing, most of the work of AI/ML applied to it is still academic. This paper briefly presents the state of the art in the field of software testing, applying ML approaches and AI algorithms. The progress analysis of the AI and ML methods used for this purpose during the last three years is based on the Scopus Elsevier, web of Science and Google Scholar databases. Algorithms used in software testing have been grouped by test types. The paper also tries to create relations between the main AI approaches and which type of tests they are applied to, in particular white-box, grey-box and black-box software testing types. We conclude that black-box testing is, by far, the preferred method of software testing, when AI is applied, and all three methods of ML (supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement) are commonly used in black-box testing being the “clustering” technique, Artificial Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms applied to “fuzzing” and regression testing.