Using Dominance for Aiding the Search-Based Testing to Overcome the Limitations of the Control-Dependencies

Search-based optimization techniques have been utilized for a number of software engineering activities. The representation of the problem and the definition of the fitness function (FF) are two key ingredients for the application of search-based optimization to software engineering problems. Therefore, a well-defined fitness function is essential to the effectiveness and efficiency of the search-based testing (SBT). Several search based test-data generation techniques have been developed. A wide range of these techniques utilized the control dependencies (CD) in the control-flow graph of the program under test for guiding the search in the direction of finding test data. To direct the SBT to generate test data, Ghiduk et al. have presented a search-based technique that utilizes the dominances (Dom) between the nodes of the control-flow graph (CFG) of the program under test. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of dominances in a control-flow graph against the control dependencies in guiding the SBT for generating test data. The paper provides a number of structures programming which challenge the SBT that is guided by the control dependencies to find test data. The paper introduces two schemes for overcoming these problems. The first scheme improves the definitions of the fitness functions of the previous work to overcome the control-dependencies problems. The second scheme presents a general form for a fitness function in terms of dominances and postdominances nodes. This function enhances significantly the efficiency of the SBT; consequently the SBT overcomes the control-dependencies problems. In addition, the paper compares between the efficiency of dominances and control dependencies in guiding SBT with proper examples from the literatures.