2026-05-30T02:34:02Zhttps://riuma.uma.es/rest/oai/request

oai:riuma.uma.es:10630/282742026-02-03T11:06:12Zcom_10630_2254col_10630_37953

00925njm 22002777a 4500 dc Ferrer-Urbano, Francisco Javier author Chicano-García, José-Francisco author Alba-Torres, Enrique author 2013-07-29 Context: Complexity measures provide us some information about software artifacts. A measure of the difficulty 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 to discover whether there exists a relationship between them and the code coverage of an automatically generated test suite. Method: The definition of this measure is based on a Markov model of the program. This model is used not only to compute the BCE, but also to provide an estimation of the number of test cases needed to reach 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 difficulty of 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 is a very promising way of measuring the difficulty to automatically test a program. Our proposed measure is useful for predicting the behavior of an automatic test case generator. Ferrer, J., Chicano, F., & Alba, E. (2013). Estimating software testing complexity. Information and Software Technology, 55(12), 2125–2139. https://hdl.handle.net/10630/28274 10.1016/j.infsof.2013.07.007 Soporte lógico Ingeniería del software Computación evolutiva Estimating Software Testing Complexity