The problem of automatically generating test input is hard. In general it involves finding inputs that cause execution reach arbitrary program branches. However, branch reachability is known to be undecidable in general. The testing community has therefore focused on techniques that seek to identify test sets that cover near optimal sets of branches in reasonable time. The RE-COST project will develop techniques based on the Search Based Software Testing approach to automated test data generation. This is because the Search Based Optimization paradigm naturally generalizes to a multi objective optimization formulation, thereby allowing us to develop techniques that balance the multiple objectives of cost and benefit. However, the algorithms for assessment of oracle cost developed by RE-COST will also be useful to other test data generation methods.

The official webpage can be found here.

Prof Mark Harman

• Dr Shin Yoo

• University of Sheffield, Dept. of Computer Science
• Motorola UK
• Berner & Mattner Systemtechnik, Germany
• Sogeti UK

This project is funded by the EPSRC.