Minimum Number of Test Paths for Prime Path and other Structural Coverage Criteria

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to determine the minimum number of test paths needed for various structural coverage criteria in software testing by transforming the problem into a flow network and solving it efficiently.

Contribution

It presents an optimal algorithm for minimizing test paths across multiple coverage criteria using flow network transformation, with proven complexity and practical evaluation.

Findings

The method achieves optimal test path counts for different coverage criteria.

The algorithm runs in $O(|V| |E|)$ time, matching the best known complexity.

Experimental results validate the method's effectiveness on real and random graphs.

Abstract

The software system under test can be modeled as a graph comprising of a set of vertices, (V) and a set of edges, (E). Test Cases are Test Paths over the graph meeting a particular test criterion. In this paper, we present a method to achieve the minimum number of Test Paths needed to cover different structural coverage criteria. Our method can accommodate Prime Path, Edge-Pair, Simple & Complete Round Trip, Edge and Node coverage criteria. Our method obtains the optimal solution by transforming the graph into a flow graph and solving the minimum flow problem. We present an algorithm for the minimum flow problem that matches the best known solution complexity of $O(|V| |E|)$. Our method is evaluated through two sets of tests. In the first, we test against graphs representing actual software. In the second test, we create random graphs of varying complexity. In each test we measure the number of Test Paths, the length of Test Paths, the lower bound on minimum number of Test Paths and the execution time.