A Survey on Automated Test Generation

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Automated Test Generation"

by

Miss Mijung KIM


Abstract:

Testing is an important and necessary activity in developing programs to gain 
confidence in their behavior, but creating test cases is a laborious and 
time-consuming job to developers. To reduce the manual effort on unit testing, 
tremendous research has been performed on automatic unit test generation based 
on various underlying techniques such as random testing, search-based testing, 
and dynamic symbolic execution. These automated testing tools provide 
developers with a set of failing tests that can possibly detect uncovered 
faults. However, automatically-generated tests are not often accepted by 
developers because they are nonsensical in various aspects such as false 
alarms.

In this survey, we focus on reviewing existing research related to the test 
generation techniques. First, we define what constitutes a test case in this 
survey and introduce the state-of-the-art tools based on the different 
underlying techniques. Second, we discuss how those tools have been enhanced to 
improve the applicability and effectiveness of test generation. Finally, we 
identify the challenges that still remain and hinder the practical use in 
industry and introduce the techniques presented in the literature addressing 
these challenges.


Date:			Wednesday, 28 September 2016

Time:                  	9:30am - 11:30am

Venue:                  Room 2304
                         Lifts 17/18

Committee Members:	Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Charles Zhang (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
 			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma


**** ALL are Welcome ****