A Comparative Study of Automated Test Explorers

Abstract: With modern computer systems becoming more and more complicated, theimportance of rigorous testing to ensure the quality of the product increases.This, however, means that the cost to perform tests also increases. In orderto address this problem, a lot of research has been conducted during thelast years to find a more automated way of testing software systems. Inthis thesis, different algorithms to automatically explore and test a systemhave been implemented and evaluated. In addition to this, a second setof algorithms have been implemented with the objective to isolate whichinteractions with the system were responsible for a failure. These algorithmswere also evaluated and compared against each other. In the first evaluationtwo explorers, which I called DeBruijn and LStarExplorer, were consideredsuperior to the other. The first used a DeBruijn sequence to brute forcea solution while the second used the L'-algorithm to build an FSM overthe system under test. This FSM could then be used to provide a moreaccurate description for when the failure occurred. The result from thesecond evaluation were two reducers which both tried to recreate a failureby first applying interactions performed just before the failure occurred. Ifthis was not successful, they tried interactions further and further away, untilthe failure was triggered. In addition to this, the thesis contains descriptionsabout the framework used to run the different strategies.