Automatic Detection of Parameter Shielding for Test Case Generation

Parameter shielding refers to the situation that one test parameter disables others in test execution. The quality of test case generation techniques is limited by the wide existence of parameter shielding. It is challenging to automatically find out conditions that cause the parameter shielding. This paper presents a novel approach for exploring the shielding conditions of test parameters. Our approach executes test inputs and collects runtime information of execution as features of test inputs. Then, a clustering algorithm is used to group test inputs with similar runtime information while a decision tree algorithm is built to extract the conditions in the groups. Finally, our approach identifies the shielding conditions based on the decision tree. Experiments on seven programs show that our approach can effectively detect the parameter shielding and the related conditions.