EvoMaster: A Search-Based System Test Generation Tool

Abstract

Testing web/enterprise applications is complex and expensive when done manually. Often, software testing takes up to half of the development time and cost for a system. So much testing is needed because the cost of software failure is simply too large: for example, in 2017, 304 software failures (reported in the media) impacted 3.6 billion people and $1.7 trillion in assets worldwide (Tricentis, 2017). Unfortunately, due to its high cost, software testing is often left incomplete, and only applied partially. To address this problem, in Software Engineering (SE) research a lot of effort has been spent in trying to design and implement novel techniques aimed at automating several different tasks, where software testing is among the most studied tasks. Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) (Harman et al., 2012) casts the problem of software testing as an optimization problem, aimed at, for example, maximizing code coverage and fault detection. Our SBST tool called EvoMaster addresses these challenges by using evolutionary techniques to automatically generate test cases. It currently focuses on RESTful web services, which are the pillars of modern web and enterprise applications (Allamaraju, 2010; Fielding, 2000). The EvoMaster tool is aimed at: