Generating Minimal Fault Detecting Test Suites for Boolean Expressions

Abstract

New coverage criteria for Boolean expressions are regularly introduced with two goals: to detect specific classes of realistic faults and to produce as small as possible test suites. In this paper we investigate whether an approach targeting specific fault classes using several reduction policies can achieve that less test cases are generated than by previously introduced testing criteria. In our approach, the problem of finding fault detecting test cases can be formalized as a logical satisfiability problem, which can be efficiently solved by a SAT algorithm. We compare this approach with respect to the well-known MUMCUT and Minimal-MUMCUT strategies by applying it to a series of case studies commonly used as benchmarks, and show that it can reduce the number of test cases further than Minimal-MUMCUT.