Automated software test data generation for complex programs

We report on GADGET, a new software test generation system that uses combinatorial optimization to obtain condition/decision coverage of C/C++ programs. The GADGET system is fully automatic and supports all C/C++ language constructs. This allows us to generate tests for programs more complex than those previously reported in the literature. We address a number of issues that are encountered when automatically generating tests for complex software systems. These issues have not been discussed in earlier work on test-data generation, which concentrates on small programs (most often single functions) written in restricted programming languages.