Supervisor of the Doctoral Program:

A chi mi ha accompagnato, sostenuto e incoraggiato. Testing should be one of the key activities of every software development process. However it requires up to half of the software development effort when it is properly done. One of the main problems is the generation of smart tests to probe the system, which is both difficult and time-consuming. The research community has been proposing several ways to automate the generation of these tests; among them, the search-based techniques recently achieved significant results. This doctoral dissertation presents TestFul, our evolutionary testing approach for stateful systems; it is tailored to work on object-oriented systems. It uses a holistic approach to make the state of object evolve, to enable all the features the class provides, and to generate the shortest test with the utmost coverage for the class under test. We employ sev