An application of genetic algorithms and BDDs to functional testing

Abstract

This paper describes a functional level rest pattern generator, which combines two techniques: genetic algorithms (GAs) and binary decision diagrams (BDDs). The combined execution of such two techniques achieves better results for functional testing, than the single application of each separated technique. The entire set of functional errors is examined in a shorter time and a more compact test set is produced. The reason of this interesting result has been analyzed in the paper. It mainly depends on the fact that hard to detect errors for GA-based testing techniques are easy to detect than errors for BDD-based techniques and vice versa. The two testing approaches are thus complementary and can effectively cooperate.