Test data regeneration: generating new test data from existing test data

Abstract

Existing automated test data generation techniques tend to start from scratch, implicitly assuming that no pre-existing test data are available. However, this assumption may not always hold, and where it does not, there may be a missed opportunity; perhaps the pre-existing test cases could be used to assist the automated generation of additional test cases. This paper introduces search-based test data regeneration, a technique that can generate additional test data from existing test data using a meta-heuristic search algorithm. The proposed technique is compared to a widely studied test data generation approach in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. The empirical evaluation shows that test data regeneration can be up to 2 orders of magnitude more efficient than existing test data generation techniques, while achieving comparable effectiveness in terms of structural coverage and mutation score.