Structural and functional sequence test of dynamic and state-based software with evolutionary algorithms

Abstract. Evolutionary Testing (ET) has been shown to be very successful for testing real world applications [10]. The original ET approach focuses on searching for a high coverage of the test object by generating separate inputs for single function calls. We have identified a large set of real world application for which this approach does not perform well because only sequential calls of the tested function can reach a high structural coverage (white box test) or can check functional behavior (black box tests). Especially, control software which is responsible for controlling and constraining a system cannot be tested successfully with ET. Such software is characterized by stor-ing internal data during a sequence of calls. In this paper we present the Evolutionary Sequence Testing approach for white box and black box tests. For automatic sequence testing, a fitness function for the applica-tion of ET will be introduced, which allows the optimization of input sequences that reach a high coverage of the software under test. The authors also present a new com-pact description for the generation of real-world input sequences for functional testing. A set of objective functions to evaluate the test output of systems under test have bee