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Ferrer-Urbano, Francisco Javier Chicano-García, José-Francisco Alba-Torres, Enrique 2023-12-13T10:50:18Z 2023-12-13T10:50:18Z 2013-07-29 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 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. eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Soporte lógico Ingeniería del software Computación evolutiva Estimating Software Testing Complexity journal article