Structural Equivalence Partition and Boundary Testing

Structural (manual or automated) testing today often overlooks typical pro- gramming faults because of inherent flaws in the simple criteria applied (e.g. branch or all-uses). Dedicated testing strategies that address such faults (e.g. mutation testing) are not specifically designed for smart automatic test case generation. In this paper we present a new coverage criterion and its implementation that accomplishes both: it detects more faults and integrates easily into automated test case generation. The criterion is targeted towards unveiling faults that originate from shifts in the equiva- lence classes that are caused by small coding errors (inspired by mutation testing). On benchmark codes from the Java-API and from an open-source project we improve the fault detection capability by up to 41% compared to branch and all-use coverage.

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