Poulding, Simon Marcus, Alexander, Rob orcid.org/0000-0003-3818-0310, Clark, John Andrew orcid.org/0000-0002-9230-9739 et al. (1 more author) (2013) The Optimisation of Stochastic Grammars to Enable Cost-Effective Probabilistic Structural Testing. In: GECCO 2013, 06-10 Jul 2013.
Abstract
The effectiveness of probabilistic structural testing depends on the characteristics of the probability distribution from which test inputs are sampled at random. Metaheuristic search has been shown to be a practical method of optimis- ing the characteristics of such distributions. However, the applicability of the existing search-based algorithm is lim- ited by the requirement that the software’s inputs must be a fixed number of numeric values. In this paper we relax this limitation by means of a new representation for the probability distribution. The repre- sentation is based on stochastic context-free grammars but incorporates two novel extensions: conditional production weights and the aggregation of terminal symbols represent- ing numeric values. We demonstrate that an algorithm which combines the new representation with hill-climbing search is able to effi- ciently derive probability distributions suitable for testing software with structurally-complex input domains.
Metadata
Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Computer Science (York) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EPSRC EP/J017515/1 EPSRC EP/E028128/1 EPSRC EP/G043604/1 |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 15 Jun 2013 00:55 |
Last Modified: | 25 Dec 2024 00:08 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:75406 |