A Comparison of Test Generation Algorithms for Testing Application Interactions

Abstract

Testing the interactions of different applications running in the same operating system or platform poses challenges for manual testing and conventional script-based automation. Towards this end, we have developed an online model-based testing solution allowing efficient testing of such interactions. This paper presents the results of the comparison of algorithms used for generating tests for interaction testing. The comparison is based on our experiments with a number of different algorithms as well as results from the earlier studies by others. Given the simplicity of implementation, Random Walk seems very useful and practical solution for online test generation. However, each of the compared algorithms has its strong points, making the selection dependent of the metric one wants to emphasize and the available a priori information. Especially when the execution of test events is slow, smarter algorithms have advantage over simple random walk.