A Complete Automation of Unit Testing for Java Programs

Program testing is expensive and labor-intensive, often consuming more than half of the total development costs, and yet it is frequently not done well and the results are not always satisfactory. However, testing is the primary method to ensure that programs comply with requirements. We describe our on-going project that attempts to completely automate unit testing of object-oriented programs. Our project investigates the use of an evolutionary approach, called genetic algorithms, for the test data generation and the use of program specifications, written in JML, for the test result determination. A proof-of-concept tool has been implemented and shows that a complete automation is feasible for unit testing Java programs. Automated testing techniques such as ours can complement manual testing by testing significant portion of object-oriented programs, as methods in object-oriented programs tend to be small; manual testing can focus more interesting problems, e.g., inter-class testing