Section 6: Intelligent testing

Up to this point, automation meant the automation of the text execution. Once we manually devised the test cases, we wrote them down as JUnit tests, which were executed by the machine.

While we studied several techniques to design test cases in a systematic manner, they all required some human effort. Our computers, however, can help a great deal in designing test cases. This is exactly what we are going to discuss in the following chapters.

We are going to work smarter rather than harder, and take a look at different testing techniques that perform software testing in an intelligent way:

• We first discuss static testing. In other words, how we can leverage program analysis to detect functional bugs and security vulnerabilities.

• We discuss mutation testing. Mutation testing helps us in measuring the fault capability detection of our test suites. After all, a test suite capable of detecting most of the bugs is better than a test suite that is only able to detect a few bugs.

• We discuss fuzz testing, where we will test the correctness of a program by automatically providing a (large number of) unexpected inputs. Fuzz testing is a common technique among security testers.

• Finally, in the search-based testing chapter, we will see how artificial intelligence or, more specifically, search algorithms, can help us in automatically devise test cases that fully cover the class under test.