A Time and Space-Efficient Compositional Method for Prime and Test Paths Generation

This paper investigates the problem of prime and test paths generation, which is an important problem in ensuring path coverage in software testing. Most existing methods for prime/test paths generation have little success in generating the set of all prime/test paths of structurally complex programs with high Npath complexity. This paper puts forward two novel methods for the generation of prime and test paths of highly complex programs, namely a vertex-based algorithm and a compositional method. The proposed vertex-based method enables a time-efficient approach for the generation of all prime paths, and the compositional method provides a highly time and space-efficient method for the generation of prime and test paths in cyclic control flow graphs with extremely large Npath complexity. We also implement the proposed algorithms as a software toolset for the generation of prime and test paths. Our experimental results on a set of complex programs indicate that the proposed approaches significantly outperform existing methods, especially for large and structurally complex programs.