Optimization of generated test data for MC/DC

Abstract

Structural coverage criteria are employed in testing according to the criticality of the application domain. Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) comes highly recommended by multiple standards, including, ISO 26262 and DO-178C in the automotive and avionics industries respectively. Yet, it is time and effort consuming to construct and maintain test suites that achieve high coverage percentages of MC/DC. Search based approaches were used to automate this task due to the problem complexity. Our results show that the generated test data could be minimized while maintaining the same coverage by considering that a certain test datum can satisfy multiple MC/DC test targets. This improves the maintainability of the generated test suite and saves the resources required to define their expected outputs and any part of the testing process that is repeated per test case.