Automatic Test Data Generation for C Programs

Abstract

Preparation of test data that adequately tests a given piece of code is very expensive and effort intensive. This paper presents a tool AutoGen that reduces this cost and effort by automatically generating test data for C code. AutoGen takes the C code and a criterion such as statement coverage, decision coverage, or Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MCDC) and generates non-redundant test data that satisfies the specified criterion. This paper also presents our experience in using this tool to generate MCDC test data for three embedded reactive system applications. The effort required using the tool was one third of the manual effort required. The main contributions of this paper are a tool that can generate data for various kinds of coverage including MCDC and the experience of running this tool on real applications.