GATE: game-based testing environment

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a game-based public testing mechanism called GATE. The purpose of GATE is to make use of the rich human resource on the Internet to help increase effectiveness in software testing and improve test adequacy. GATE facilitates public testing in three main steps: 1) decompose the test criterion satisfaction problem into many smaller sub-model satisfaction problems; 2) construct games for each individual sub-models and presenting the games to the public through web servers; 3) collect and convert public users' action sequence data into real test cases which guarantee to cover not adequately tested elements. A preliminary study on apache-commons-math library shows that 44% of the branches have not been adequately tested by state of the art automatic test generation techniques. Among these branches, at least 42% are decomposable by GATE into smaller sub-problems. These elements naturally become the potential targets of GATE for public game-based testing.