Search based software test data generation for structural testing

Abstract

Software testing is an important and expensive phase of the software development life cycle. Over the past few decades, there has been an ongoing research to automate the process of software testing but the attempts have been constrained by the size and the complexity of software especially due to the use of dynamic memory allocation which makes the software behavior highly unpredictable. The use of metaheuristic global search techniques for software test data generation has been the focus of researchers in recent years. Many new techniques and hybrid methods have been proposed to tackle the problem more effectively. This study provides an overview of the various techniques that have been applied for structural test data generation. It also presents the open areas, challenges and future directions in the field of search based software testing with an emphasis on test data generation for structural testing.