Using a genetic algorithm and formal concept analysis to generate branch coverage test data automatically
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Automatic test generators (ATGs) are an important support tool for large-scale software development. Contemporary ATGs include JTest that does white box testing down to the method level only and black box testing if a specification exists, and AETG that tests pairwise interactions among input variables. The first automatic test generation approaches were static, based on symbolic execution (Clarke, 1976). Korel suggested a dynamic approach to automatic test data generation using function minimization and directed search (Korel, 1990). A dynamic approach can handle array, pointer, function and other dynamic constructs more accurately than a static approach but it may also be more expensive since the program under test is executed repeatedly. Subsequent ATGs explored the use of genetic algorithms (Jones et al., 1996; Michael et al., 2001; Pargas et al., 1999) and simulated annealing (Tracey et al., 1998). These ATGs address the problem of producing test data for low level code coverage like statement, branch and condition/decision and depend on branch function (Korel, 1990) style instrumentation (Jones et al., 1996; Michael et al., 2001) and/or the program graph (Jones et al., 1996; Pargas et al., 1999). Unlike previous work, our ATG, called genet, produces test data for branch coverage with simpler instrumentation than branch functions, does not use program graphs, and is programming language independent, genet uses a genetic algorithm (GA) (Holland, 1975) to search for tests and formal concept analysis (FCA) (Ganter and Wille, 1999) to organize the relationships between tests and their execution traces. The combination of GA with FCA is novel. Further, genet extends the opportunistic approach of GADGET (Michael et al., 2001) by targeting several uncovered branches simultaneously. The relationships that genet learns provides useful insights for test selection, test maintenance and debugging
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it