Elgendy, I.T., Hierons, R.M. orcid.org/0000-0002-4771-1446 and McMinn, P. orcid.org/0000-0001-9137-7433
(2025)
A systematic mapping study of the metrics, uses and subjects of diversity‐based testing techniques.
Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 35 (2).
e1914.
ISSN 0960-0833
Abstract
There has been a significant amount of interest regarding the use of DBTtsfull in software testing over the past two decades. Diversity-based testing (DBT) technique uses similarity metrics to leverage the dissimilarity between software artefacts—such as requirements, abstract models, programme structures or inputs—in order to address a software testing problem. DBT techniques have been used to assist in finding solutions to several different types of problems including generating test cases, prioritizing them and reducing very large test suites. This paper is a systematic mapping study of DBT techniques that summarizes the key aspects and trends of 167 papers that report the use of 79 different similarity metrics with 22 different types of software artefacts, which have been used by researchers to tackle 11 different types of software testing problems. We further present an analysis of the recent trends in DBT techniques and review the different application domains to which the techniques have been applied, giving an overview of the tools developed by researchers in order to do so. Finally, the paper identifies some DBT challenges that are potential topics for future work, such as exploring other diversity artefacts and measuring diversity for complex data input.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | diversity artefacts; diversity-based testing; diversity-based tools; fault localization; similarity-based testing; similarity metrics; test data generation; test case prioritization; test case selection; test suite reduction |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 21 Jan 2025 12:23 |
Last Modified: | 21 Jan 2025 12:23 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1914 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/stvr.1914 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:222006 |