An Efficient Method for Automated Regression Test Data Generation for C/C++ Projects

Abstract

Regression test is a well-known method to ensure that both unchanged and evolved functions of the evolving software are in good quality. This is known to be an expensive task even with automated test data generation methods. For this reason, this paper proposes an effective method to maintain and reuse the test data generation results from previous versions for regression test of the evolved version. The key idea of the proposed method is that for unchanged units, we can reuse the whole previous test data. For evolved units, we reuse as many as possible the solutions of the unchanged test path constraints and generate new test data for only the new or updated test path constraints. The analysis shows that the proposed method has a high potential of applicability in regression test of C/C++ projects in practice. We give discussions about several evolving scenarios of a given unit and how the proposed method comes to effective in such scenarios.