An Automated Test Data Generation Method for Templates of C++ Projects

Template in C++ is a useful programming method to create libraries or common classes for data structures or algorithms. This paper presents a fully automated method, named TEC, to generate test data for unit testing of templates in C++ projects. The main idea of TEC is to add a source code pre-processing phase to concolic testing method. This phase is to parse source code of a given template and its including project to find lists of suitable data types for each template parameter. These lists of data types are combined and passed to templates to create concrete source code. Then, TEC uses concolic testing to generate test data for these source code. We have implemented TEC method and performed experiments with potential results. In addition, we give some discussions about the experimental results in the paper.