An accelerating PSO algorithm based test data generator for data-flow dependencies using dominance concepts

One of the most important and effort intensive activity of the entire software development process is software testing. The effort involved chiefly increases because of the need to obtain optimal test data out of the entire search space of the problem under testing. Software test data generation is one area that has seen tremendous research in terms of automation and optimization. Generating or identifying an optimal test set that satisfies a more robust adequacy criteria, like data flow testing, is still a challenging task. A number of heuristic and meta-heuristics like GA, PSO have been applied to optimize the test data generation problem. GA, although more popular, has its own difficulties such as complex to implement and slow convergence rate. In this paper an accelerating particle swarm optimization algorithm (APSO) is applied to generate test data for data-flow dependencies of a program guided by a new fitness function. APSO is used because of its capability of balancing in exploration and exploitation. A new fitness function is designed based on the concepts of dominance relations, weighted branch distance for APSO to guide the search direction. A set of benchmark programs and four modules of Krishna Institute of Engineering and Technology ERP system were taken for the experimental analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed APSO based approach performed significantly better than random search, genetic algorithm and PSO in enhancing the convergence speed.