Automatic generation of cost-effective test oracles

Abstract

Software testing is the primary activity to guarantee some level of quality of software systems. In software testing, the role of test oracles is crucial: The quality of test oracles directly affects the effectiveness of the testing activity and influences the final quality of software systems. So far, research in software testing focused mostly on automating the generation of test inputs and the execution of test suites, paying less attention to the generation of test oracles. Available techniques for generating test oracle are either effective but expensive or inexpensive but ineffective. Our research work focuses on the generation of cost-effective test oracles. Recent research work has shown that modern software systems can provide the same functionality through different execution sequences. In other words, multiple execution sequences perform the same, or almost the same, action. This phenomenon is called intrinsic redundancy of software systems. We aim to design and develop a completely automated technique to generate test oracles by exploiting the intrinsic redundancy freely available in the software. Test oracles generated by our technique check the equivalence between a given execution sequence and all the redundant and supposedly equivalent execution sequences that are available. The results obtained so far are promising.