Towards Migrating Genetic Algorithms for Test Data Generation to the Cloud

Abstract

Search-Based Software Testing is a well-established research area, whose goal is to apply meta-heuristic approaches, like Genetic Algorithms, to address optimization problems in the testing domain. Even if many interesting results have been achieved in this field, the heavy computational resources required by these approaches are limiting their practical application in the industrial domain. In this chapter, the authors propose the migration of Search-Based Software Testing techniques to the Cloud aiming to improve their performance and scalability. Moreover, they show how the use of the MapReduce paradigm can support the parallelization of Genetic Algorithms for test data generation and their migration in the Cloud, thus relieving software company from the management and maintenance of the overall IT infrastructure and developers from handling the communication and synchronization of parallel tasks. Some preliminary results are reported, gathered by a proof-of-concept developed on the Google’s Cloud Infrastructure.