Optimization metaheuristic for software testing

Abstract

This paper presents an evolutionary method for testing web applications. Although state-based testing has been reported, few papers have addressed modern web applications. In our work, we model web applications by associating features or web pages with states; state transition diagrams are based on events representing state transitions. We formulate the web application testing problem as an optimization problem and use a simulated annealing (SA) metaheuristic algorithm to generate test cases as sequences of events while keeping the test suite size reasonable. SA evolves a solution by minimizing a function that is based on the contradictory objectives of coverage of events, diversity of events covered, and definite continuity of events. Our experimental results show that the proposed simultaneous-operation SA gives better results than an incremental SA version and significantly better than a greedy algorithm.