ESSENT: an arithmetic optimization algorithm with enhanced scatter search strategy for automated test case generation

As one of the main research tasks in software testing, automated test case generation based on path coverage (ATCG-PC) aims to achieve maximum path coverage with a minimized set of test cases. In ATCG-PC, the correlation among the dimensions of test cases is widely utilized in academia to minimize the search efforts of the search-based algorithm. Nevertheless, the information related to target path selection is not utilized, which leads to blind decision-making by the search-based algorithm during the target path selection. Therefore, this paper proposes an enhanced scatter search strategy by using opposition-based learning. An arithmetic optimization algorithm is also proposed to solve ATCG-PC based on the enhanced scatter search strategy, namely, ESSENT. The ESSENT algorithm selects the path with the lowest path entropy among the uncovered paths as the target path, and generates new test cases that cover the target path by modifying the dimensions of the existing test cases. The performance of the ESSENT algorithm is evaluated on six iFogSim subprograms and six Stanford coreNLP subprograms. Experiment results show that the ESSENT algorithm achieves a higher convergence rate than other state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, it enables maximum path coverage with fewer test cases.