On Improvements of the Error Detection Capability in Concolic Testing for Java Projects

To ensure the software quality, testing methods aim at both targets of achieving high code coverage and error detection capability. Among various testing methods, the Concolic Testing has proven effective in generating test data that gains high code coverage. However, the error detection capability of the test data is limited, especially in cases such as with boundary values. In this paper, we propose a method named BEC that combines the Concolic Testing method with the Boundary Value Analysis (BVA) and Equivalence Class Partitioning (ECP) to improve the error detection capability of the generated test data by the Concolic testing method. The key idea of the method is to extract the boundary values from simple conditions of the given unit source code. From these values, BEC generates test data using the combination of the BVA and ECP methods. These test data help improve the error detection capability of the test data set generated by the Concolic testing method. Experimental results indicate that BEC can dramatically detect more errors than the Concolic Testing method. We give some discussions about the proposed method in the paper.