Does Automated Unit Test Generation Really Help Software Testers? A Controlled Empirical Study

• Published in: ACM transactions on software engineering and methodology Vol. 24; no. 4; pp. 1 - 49
• Main Authors: Fraser, Gordon, Staats, Matt, McMinn, Phil, Arcuri, Andrea, Padberg, Frank
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.08.2015
• Subjects: Automation; Communities; Computer programs; Construction specifications; Developers; Hand tools; Specifications; Tasks
• ISSN: 1049-331X; 1557-7392
• DOI: 10.1145/2699688

Work on automated test generation has produced several tools capable of generating test data which achieves high structural coverage over a program. In the absence of a specification, developers are expected to manually construct or verify the test oracle for each test input. Nevertheless, it is ass...