Using Advanced Code Analysis for Boosting Unit Test Creation

Abstract

Unit testing is a popular testing technique, widespread in enterprise IT and embedded/safety-critical. For enterprise IT, unit testing is considered to be good practice and is frequently followed as an element of test-driven development. In the safety-critical world, there are many standards, such as ISO 26262, IEC 61508, and others, that either directly or indirectly mandate unit testing. Regardless the area of the application, unit testing is very time-consuming and teams are looking for strategies to optimize their efforts. This is especially true in the safety-critical space, where demonstration of test coverage is required for the certification. In this presentation, we share the results of our research regarding the use of advanced code analysis algorithms for augmenting the process of unit test creation. The discussion includes automatic discovery of inputs and responses from mocked components that maximize the code coverage and automated generation of the test cases.