Generating Test Data for Branch Coverage




Soffa


methods


Branch coverage is an important criteria used 
during the structural testing of programs. In 
this paper, we present a new program 
execution based method to generate input data 
that exercises a selected branch in a 
program. The test data generation is initiated 
with an arbitrarily chosen input from the 
input domain of the program. A new 
input is derived from the initial input 
in an attempt to force execution through 
any of the paths through the selected 
branch. The method dynamically builds the path 
as it tries to force execution through 
the selected branch. We have implemented the 
technique and present experimental results of its 
performance. The method is general and can 
be easily extended to derive input test 
cases for other types of structural coverage 
criteria such as data flow testing.