Smartunit: Empirical evaluations for automated unit testing of embedded software in industry

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at the automated unit coverage-based testing for embedded software. To achieve the goal, by analyzing the industrial requirements and our previous work on automated unit testing tool CAUT, we rebuild a new tool, SmartUnit, to solve the engineering requirements that take place in our partner companies. SmartUnit is a dynamic symbolic execution implementation, which supports statement, branch, boundary value and MC/DC coverage. SmartUnit has been used to test more than one million lines of code in real projects. For confidentiality motives, we select three in-house real projects for the empirical evaluations. We also carry out our evaluations on two open source database projects, SQLite and PostgreSQL, to test the scalability of our tool since the scale of the embedded software project is mostly not large, 5K-50K lines of code on average. From our experimental results, in general, more than 90% of functions in commercial embedded software achieve 100% statement, branch, MC/DC coverage, more than 80% of functions in SQLite achieve 100% MC/DC coverage, and more than 60% of functions in PostgreSQL achieve 100% MC/DC coverage. Moreover, SmartUnit is able to find the runtime exceptions at the unit testing level. We also have reported exceptions like array index out of bounds and divided-by-zero in SQLite. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons of low coverage in automated unit testing in our setting and give a survey on the situation of manual unit testing with respect to automated unit testing in industry.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings 2018 ACM/IEEE 40th International Conference on Software Engineering
Subtitle of host publicationSoftware Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2018
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages296-305
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356596
DOIs
StatePublished - 27 May 2018
Event40th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2018 - Gothenburg, Sweden
Duration: 27 May 20181 Jun 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference40th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2018
Country/TerritorySweden
CityGothenburg
Period27/05/181/06/18

Keywords

  • Automated unit testing
  • Dynamic symbolic execution
  • Embedded system

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