RT Journal Article
T1 Estimating Software Testing Complexity
A1 Ferrer-Urbano, Francisco Javier
A1 Chicano-García, José-Francisco
A1 Alba-Torres, Enrique
K1 Soporte lógico
K1 Ingeniería del software
K1 Computación evolutiva
AB Context: Complexity measures provide us some information about software artifacts. A measure of thedifficulty of testing a piece of code could be very useful to take control about the test phase.Objective: The aim in this paper is the definition of a new measure of the difficulty for a computer to gen erate test cases, we call it Branch Coverage Expectation (BCE). We also analyze the most common com plexity measures and the most important features of a program. With this analysis we are trying todiscover whether there exists a relationship between them and the code coverage of an automaticallygenerated test suite.Method: The definition of this measure is based on a Markov model of the program. This model is usednot only to compute the BCE, but also to provide an estimation of the number of test cases needed toreach a given coverage level in the program. In order to check our proposal, we perform a theoretical val idation and we carry out an empirical validation study using 2600 test programs.Results: The results show that the previously existing measures are not so useful to estimate the difficultyof testing a program, because they are not highly correlated with the code coverage. Our proposed mea sure is much more correlated with the code coverage than the existing complexity measures.Conclusion: The high correlation of our measure with the code coverage suggests that the BCE measure isa very promising way of measuring the difficulty to automatically test a program. Our proposed measureis useful for predicting the behavior of an automatic test case generator.
PB Science Direct
YR 2013
FD 2013-07-29
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/28274
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/28274
LA eng
NO Ferrer, J., Chicano, F., & Alba, E. (2013). Estimating software testing complexity. Information and Software Technology, 55(12), 2125–2139.
NO This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDERunder contract TIN2011-28194 (the roadME project)
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 21 ene 2026