Evolutionary testing of unstructured programs in the presence of flag problems

Automated test data generation is always a hot topic in software engineering, and evolutionary testing (ET) is an emerging and promising technology for this purpose. However, in structural testing, the presence of flag variables lead evolutionary testing degenerate to random testing. All previous work only focused on the flag problem in structural programs, and no attention has been paid to unstructured programs with flag conditions, although numerous industrial real-world programs are of this kind. In this paper, as a further step of the author's research, a fitness calculation rule for flag conditions in unstructured programs is proposed. The experiments on exemplifications recurrent in industrial real-world programs, such as Linux and NS2, show that our new fitness calculation rule could effectively guide evolutionary search to successfully find the required test data at low cost, while all previous approaches failed.