Input Algebras

Grammar-based test generators are highly efficient in producing syntactically valid test inputs, and give their user precise control over which test inputs should be generated. Adapting a grammar or a test generator towards a particular testing goal can be tedious, though. We introduce the concept o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 699 - 710
Main Authors: Gopinath, Rahul, Nemati, Hamed, Zeller, Andreas
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.05.2021
Subjects:
Computer bugs
debuggin
faults
Generators
Grammar
oracles
Software
Software engineering
Test pattern generators
Testing
ISBN:1665402962, 9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Grammar-based test generators are highly efficient in producing syntactically valid test inputs, and give their user precise control over which test inputs should be generated. Adapting a grammar or a test generator towards a particular testing goal can be tedious, though. We introduce the concept of a grammar transformer, specializing a grammar towards inclusion or exclusion of specific patterns: "The phone number must not start with 011 or +1". To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first approach to allow for arbitrary Boolean combinations of patterns, giving testers unprecedented flexibility in creating targeted software tests. The resulting specialized grammars can be used with any grammar-based fuzzer for targeted test generation, but also as validators to check whether the given specialization is met or not, opening up additional usage scenarios. In our evaluation on real-world bugs, we show that specialized grammars are accurate both in producing and validating targeted inputs.
ISBN:1665402962
9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00070