Enabling Object Reuse on Genetic Programming-Based Approaches to Object-Oriented Evolutionary Testing

Recent research on search-based test data generation for Object-Oriented software has relied heavily on typed Genetic Programming for representing and evolving test data. However, standard typed Genetic Programming approaches do not allow Object Reuse; this paper proposes a novel methodology to overcome this limitation. Object Reuse means that one instance can be passed to multiple methods as an argument, or multiple times to the same method as arguments. In the context of Object-Oriented Evolutionary Testing, it enables the generation of test programs that exercise structures of the software under test that would not be reachable otherwise. Additionally, the experimental studies performed show that the proposed methodology is able to effectively increase the performance of the test data generation process.