Research On Path Space Reduction In Automated Unit Test

Automated unit test adopts symbolic execution and constraint solving techniques. It obtains the symbolic values of the path during the execution, after that it modifies the constraint and generate a new test input. This work is manipulated by iterations automatically to achieve the unit test goal. In recent years, many such tools are developed, such as DART, CUTE, PEX and so on.However, for unit test, one difficulty is how to tackle with the explosion of path space, there's no strong and persuasive solution currently. In this paper, we present our solution on how to eliminate the path space through removing irrelevant part of path in compositional functions and combining equivalent paths with affecting the branch coverage rate of the to-be-tested unit. Our experiments reveal that our solution can significantly eliminate the path space without affecting the unit test result.