Using Advanced Code Analysis for Boosting Unit Test Creation

Unit testing is a popular testing technique, widespread in both enterprise IT and embedded/safety-critical worlds. For enterprise IT, unit testing is considered a good practice and is frequently followed as an element of test-driven development. In the safety-critical world, there are many standards (e.g. ISO 26262, IEC 61508) that either directly or indirectly mandate unit testing. But unit testing is very time-consuming, and teams are looking for strategies to optimize their efforts, especially in the safety-critical space, where demonstration of test coverage is required for certification. In this presentation, we share the results of our research regarding the use of advanced code analysis algorithms for augmenting the process of unit test creation. Key to the discussion is automatic discovery of the inputs and responses from mocked components that maximize code coverage, and automatically generating test cases to optimize test creation time.