GRT: An Automated Test Generator Using Orchestrated Program Analysis

Abstract

While being highly automated and easy to use, existing techniques of random testing suffer from low code coverage and defect detection ability for practical software applications. Most tools use a pure black-box approach, which does not use knowledge specific to the software under test. Mining and leveraging the information of the software under test can be promising to guide random testing to overcome such limitations. Guided Random Testing (GRT) implements this idea. GRT performs static analysis on software under test to extract relevant knowledge and further combines the information extracted at run-time to guide the whole test generation procedure. GRT is highly configurable, with each of its six program analysis components implemented as a pluggable module whose parameters can be adjusted. Besides generating test cases, GRT also automatically creates a test coverage report. We show our experience in GRT tool development and demonstrate its practical usage using two concrete application scenarios.