Link: Exploiting the Web of Data to Generate Test Inputs

Applications that process complex data, such as maps, personal data, book information, travel data, etc., are becoming extremely common. Testing such applications is hard, because they require realistic and coherent test inputs that are expensive to generate manually and di cult to synthesize automatically. So far the research on test case generation techniques has focused mostly on generating test sequences and synthetic test inputs, and has payed little attention to the generation of complex test inputs. This paper presents Link, a technique to automatically generate test cases for applications that process complex data. The novel idea of Link is to exploit the Web of Data to generate test data that match the semantics of the related fields, and satisfy the semantic constraints that arise among interrelated elds. Link automatically analyzes the GUI of the application under test, generates a model of the required inputs, queries DBPedia to extract the data that can be used in the tests, and uses the extracted data to generate complex system test inputs. The experimental results show that Link can generate realistic and coherent test inputs that can exercise behaviors difficult to exercise with currently available techniques