Search–Based Testing

This thesis is concerned with the problem of automatic test data genera-tion for structural testing criteria, in particular the branch coverage ade-quacy criterion, using search–based techniques. The primary objective of this thesis is to advance the current state–of–the–art in automated search– based structural testing. Despite the large body of work within the field of search–based testing, the accompanying literature remains without con-vincing solutions for several important problems, including: support for pointers, dynamic data structures, and loop–assigned flag variables. Fur-thermore, relatively little work has been done to extend search–based testing to multi–objective problem formulations. One of the obstacles for the wider uptake of search–based testing has been the lack of publicly available tools, which may have contributed to the lack of empirical studies carried out on real–world systems. This thesis presents AUSTIN, a prototype structural test data generation tool for the C lan