Improving Code Coverage for Structural Testing by using Parametric Inter-procedural Slicing

Abstract

Structural testing is one of the testing techniques in software testing. It is the testing process of internal structure in the given source code by comparing the expected result and real results and finding out faults. To complete the structural testing, it takes a long time and needs to improve code coverage. Thus, this paper focus on improving code coverage of structural testing by using parametric inter-procedural slicing with backward slicing technique. In program slicing, there are two types of slicing: forward and backward slicing depending on the slicing direction. In this paper, backward slicing is used and it starts at the criteria for the slice consideration. The parametric inter- procedural slicing is one of the program slicing techniques which is an algorithm that takes the slice criteria as a parameter and work to handle inter-procedural data flow by considering many possible dependence relations. By slicing the original input program before measuring code coverage, the input program is simplified and excluded unexecutable statements. Therefore, the proposed system in this paper can reduce the complexity of the source code and improve code coverage for structural testing. Moreover, the used dataset in experiment is benchmark dataset in C and it is converted to Java for the improvement of language oriented.