Exploiting the largest available zone: A proactive approach to adaptive random testing by exclusion

Abstract

Adaptive random testing (ART) has been proposed to enhance the effectiveness of random testing (RT) through more even spreading of the test cases. In particular, restricted random testing (RRT) is an ART algorithm based on the intuition of skipping all the candidate test cases that are within the neighborhoods (or zones) of previously executed test cases. RRT has higher effectiveness than RT in terms of failure detection but incurs a higher time cost. In this paper, we aim to further reduce the time costs for RRT and improve the effectiveness for RT and ART methods. We propose a proactive technique known as “RRT by largest available zone” (RRT-LAZ). Like RRT, RRT-LAZ first defines an exclusion zone around every executed test case in order to determine the available zones. Unlike the original RRT, RRT-LAZ then compares all the available zones to proactively pick the largest one, from which the next test case is randomly generated. Both simulation analyses and empirical studies have been employed to investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of RRT-LAZ in relation to RT and related ART algorithms. The results show that RRT-LAZ has significantly lower time costs than RRT. Furthermore, RRT-LAZ is more effective than RT and related ART methods for block failure patterns in low-dimensional input spaces. In general, since RRT-LAZ employs a proactive technique instead of a passive one in generating next cases, it is much more cost-effective than RRT. RRT-LAZ is also more cost-effective than RT and other ART methods that we have studied.