An approach of optimal path generation using ant colony optimization

Software Testing is one of the indispensable parts of the software development lifecycle and structural testing is one of the most widely used testing paradigms to test various software. Structural testing relies on code path identification, which in turn leads to identification of effective paths. Aim of the current paper is to present a simple and novel algorithm with the help of an ant colony optimization, for the optimal path identification by using the basic property and behavior of the ants. This novel approach uses certain set of rules to find out all the effective/optimal paths via ant colony optimization (ACO) principle. The method concentrates on generation of paths, equal to the cyclomatic complexity. This algorithm guarantees full path coverage.

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