A Survey on Automatic Test Data Generation

In order to reduce the high cost of manual software testing and at the same time to increase the reliability of the testing processes researchers and practitioners have tried to automate it. One of the most important components in a testing environment is an automatic test data generator — a system that automatically generates test data for a given program. Through the years several attempts in automatic test data generations have been made. The focus of this article is program-based generation, where the generation starts from the actual programs. Thus, techniques such as GUI-based and syntax-based test data generation are not an issue in this article. In this article I present a survey on automatic test data generation techniques that can be found in current literature. Basic concepts and notions of test data generation as well as how a test data generator system works are described. Problems of automatic generation are identified and explained. Finally important and challenging future research topics are presented.