Automatic Synthesis of Test Cases to Identify Software Redundancy

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated approach to generate execution scenarios for identifying redundant or equivalent methods in software, enhancing the effectiveness of test case synthesis without manual scenario creation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel technique to automatically generate execution scenarios, reducing manual effort and improving the detection of software redundancies.

Findings

Successfully generates execution scenarios for Java Stack within reasonable time

Generated scenarios improve the effectiveness of equivalence detection techniques

Approach reduces manual effort in scenario creation

Abstract

Software system can include redundant implementation elements, such as, different methods that can produce indistinguishable results. This type of redundancy is called intrinsic if it is already available in the software, although not intentionally planned. Redundancy can be a key element to increase the reliability of a system. Some fault tolerance and self-healing techniques exploit the redundancy to avoid failures at runtime. Unfortunately, inferring which operations are equivalent manually can be expensive and error prone. A technique proposed in previous work allows to automatically synthesizes method sequences that are equivalent to a target method. However this technique needs an execution scenario to work. Currently, this execution scenario is generated manually that is expensive and makes the technique hard to use. This paper proposes a technique to generate execution scenarios for a target method for which we are searching equivalent sequences. The experimental results obtained on the Java class Stack show that the proposed approach correctly generates execution scenarios within reasonable execution time. Besides, the execution scenarios generated allow to maximize the effectiveness of the technique described above.