An industrial case study in compiler testing (tool demo)

Abstract

Compiler construction is one of the oldest areas of software engineering, yet despite its maturity it has underdeveloped sides such as compiler testing. There exist many disparate methods for testing parsers, optimisers and other components, but no unified methodology that consumable by practitioners from a book to be directly applied to fulfil their needs. Instead of striving to cover all theoretical aspects of compiler testing in one paper, we present a case study for an ongoing project of a relatively large size for our company (2 years, 3--6 devs, 500kLOC), a clean room compiler development effort in replicating a 4GL. We built a testing framework and a model-based test data generator, which consumes manually written specifications and generates all the necessary test code in the 4GL, in the host language, and in auxiliary DSLs (batch files, XML project descriptions), to both the developers' and the customer's satisfaction. The number of specifications is 927 at the publication time, while the number of test cases generated from them, is 6268. All these tests have been run prior to shipping for the last 49 releases of the compiler, both to ensure the lack of regression and to report on the project overall progress. The generated tests are separated into 11 categories which the paper details in the hope that the classification will aid in seeking related work and in pushing this line of research forward.