Tutorial on automated structural testing with PathCrawler

Abstract

Automation of test-case generation brings obvious benefits. In critical systems processes where structural testing is required by the development norm, manually creating tests from the specification fails to achieve complete satisfaction of the coverage criterion. In this case, automatic methods help to reach the objectives which are not covered and provide corresponding path conditions that may be used to refine the specification if needed. They may also determine whether the objectives which are not yet covered are really infeasible. Even when the development process does not impose any structural testing activity, the use of a structural test generation tool is a way to increase the quality of the software with a very low cost overhead. PathCrawler is a concolic test generation tool developed at CEA LIST for structural testing of C programs. It aims to cover all feasible program paths. The new version of PathCrawler is developed in an entirely novel form: that of a test-case generation web service which is freely accessible at PathCrawler-online.com. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.