TY - GEN
T1 - On the Usefulness of Crossover in Search-Based Test Case Generation
T2 - 29th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC 2022
AU - Huang, Changze
AU - Zhou, Hailian
AU - Zhao, Hongbing
AU - Cai, Wenting
AU - Zhou, Zhi Quan
AU - Jiang, Mingyue
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The crossover operation is an important component of genetic algorithms for test case generation. The usefulness of crossover, however, is not really clear, especially for industrial settings. This research applies EvoSuite, a well-known searchbased test case generator, to both open-source and industrial Java programs, and investigates the impact of the use of crossover on the code coverage achieved by the generated test cases. Our empirical study shows that the usefulness of the crossover operation varies for open-source and industrial code, and that the crossover operation may not necessarily be good, especially for some industrial programs. We further analyze (un)favorable conditions/code features for the use of crossover operations, providing hints for effective test case generation.
AB - The crossover operation is an important component of genetic algorithms for test case generation. The usefulness of crossover, however, is not really clear, especially for industrial settings. This research applies EvoSuite, a well-known searchbased test case generator, to both open-source and industrial Java programs, and investigates the impact of the use of crossover on the code coverage achieved by the generated test cases. Our empirical study shows that the usefulness of the crossover operation varies for open-source and industrial code, and that the crossover operation may not necessarily be good, especially for some industrial programs. We further analyze (un)favorable conditions/code features for the use of crossover operations, providing hints for effective test case generation.
KW - Automated Unit Test Generation
KW - Genetic Algorithm
KW - Search-Based Testing
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85149175393
U2 - 10.1109/APSEC57359.2022.00054
DO - 10.1109/APSEC57359.2022.00054
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85149175393
T3 - Proceedings - Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC
SP - 417
EP - 421
BT - Proceedings - 2022 29th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC 2022
PB - IEEE Computer Society
Y2 - 6 December 2022 through 9 December 2022
ER -