Directed test suite augmentation via exploiting program dependency

Regression testing is a practice to discover faults introduced in the program modification. However, the existing test suite is usually designed at an early stage of software development and is therefore insensitive to subsequent program changes. Although symbolic execution such as JPF-SE is able to produce test cases for the modified program by exhaustively exploring program paths, it is not tailored for testing program changes and is not scalable. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach called Directed Test Suite Augmentation (DTSA) to automatically generate test cases that can reach the changed statements, produce different program states after executing the changed statements, and propagate the different states to the output of the program. The key insight of DTSA is to reorder the generated test cases tailored for testing program changes compared with JPF-SE. We implemented a prototype of our approach and the experiment results show that DTSA requires about 60.1% and 45.6% fewer Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) runs to generate the desired test case than JPF-SE and another test suite augmentation tool eXpress, respectively.