A domain based new code coverage metric and a related automated test data generation method

Abstract

Since programmers write programs there has always been a need to analyze the correctness of these programs, which is mostly done by testing. However, testing our programs does not give any direct quality guarantee on them, because it highly depends on the used test data set. Numerous code coverage metrics can be applied to measure the quality of our test set, but the majority of them were primarily designed for imperative programs, and they rely mostly on control structures like branching and looping. The problem is that expression-heavy programs and functional programming languages normally do not have thes structures. Hence, the corresponding code coverage metrics are unsuitable at least, but mainly useless for these kinds of programs. In this paper we propose a new code coverage (domain coverage) metric, which is based on (arithmetic) expressions. The relations and effects among them are taken into account, such as some kind of semantics information about the programming language constructs. The paper also presents an automated test data generation method, which is related to domain coverage, and aims to reach the highest possible coverage ratio.