A Retrospective on Whole Test Suite Generation: On the Role of SBST in the Age of LLMs

This paper presents a retrospective of the article “Whole Test Suite Generation”, published in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, in 2012. We summarize its main contributions, and discuss how this work impacted the research field of Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) in the last 12 years. The novel techniques presented in the paper were implemented in the tool EvoSuite, which has been so far the state-of-the-art in unit test generation for Java programs using SBST. SBST has shown practical and impactful applications, creating the foundations to open the doors to tackle several other software testing problems besides unit testing, like for example system testing of Web APIs with EvoMaster. We conclude our retrospective with our reflections on what lies ahead, especially considering the important role that SBST still plays even in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs).