The Environment Problem in Software Testing

Research has produced efficient methods to exercise programs in order to find bugs. However, these methods depend on programs being tested in isolation of their environment (e.g., filesystem, network, databases). As most programs have such dependencies, this makes it impossible to apply state of the art research techniques on "real" software. The aim of this project is to automatically handle the environment problem during unit test generation. This work builds on the existing infrastructure of the EvoSuite JUnit test generation tool (www.evosuite.org), which efficiently generates unit tests for single threaded software using a genetic algorithm. Ideally, test generation will not only produce plain test inputs, but also test environments, e.g. by populating databases and filesystems. We collaborate with major software engineering companies like Google on this topic.