A Non-Test Driver Concolic-Based Unit Testing Method for Java Projects

Abstract

Concolic and many Concolic-based testing methods play an important role in saving the manual testing effort by fully automate the unit testing process. However, the performance of those methods is a big challenge when applying them to large-scale projects in practice. This paper presents another Concolic-based method named NTD addressing this problem. The key idea of NTD is to remove the need of creating and building a test driver for each generated test data which are the slowest steps of the testing process. For this purpose, NTD creates a cloned project, puts the instrumentation information into the required units, and re-compiles the cloned project. Then, the unit inside the compiled cloned project is invoked when test data needs executing during the testing process. We have implemented NTD method in a tool named NTD-AUT and performed experiments with some open-source projects. The experimental results show that NTD outperforms Concolic testing method in terms of testing speed. We give some discussions inside the paper.