.NET/C# instrumentation for search-based software testing

Abstract

C# is one of the most widely used programming languages. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no work in the literature aimed at enabling search-based software testing techniques for applications running on the .NET platform, like the ones written in C#. In this paper, we propose a search-based approach and an open source tool to enable white-box testing for C# applications. The approach is integrated with a .NET bytecode instrumentation, in order to collect code coverage at runtime during the search. In addition, by taking advantage of Branch Distance, we define heuristics to better guide the search, e.g., how heuristically close it is to cover a branch in the source code. To empirically evaluate our technique, we integrated our tool into the EvoMaster test generation tool and conducted experiments on three .NET RESTful APIs as case studies. Results show that our technique significantly outperforms gray-box testing tools in terms of code coverage.