Resource-based test case generation for RESTful web services

Zhang, Man; Marculescu, Bogdan; Arcuri, Andrea

doi:10.1145/3321707.3321815

Cited by 29 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…This research work led to several publications: novel search algorithms such as MIO (Arcuri, 2017a(Arcuri, , 2018b, addressing the white-box testing of RESTful APIs (Arcuri, 2017b(Arcuri, , 2019, resource-dependency handling (Zhang et al, 2019), accesses to SQL databases (Arcuri & Galeotti, 2019), and novel testability transformations (Arcuri & Galeotti, 2020).…”

Section: Published Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

EvoMaster: A Search-Based System Test Generation Tool

Arcuri¹,

Galeotti²,

Marculescu³

et al. 2021

JOSS

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Section: Published Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

EvoMaster: A Search-Based System Test Generation Tool

Arcuri¹,

Galeotti²,

Marculescu³

et al. 2021

JOSS

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“…OpenAPI specifications are also required in our approach for accessing and characterizing the APIs of the SUT (e.g., which endpoints are available, and what types of data they expect as input). As we first introduced in Arcuri (2019) and Zhang et al (2019), the Ope-nAPI specifications are further utilized for identifying resource dependencies, similarly to what recently done by approaches like in Atlidakis et al (2019) and Karlsson et al (2020). However, the dependencies we identify are for resources, and not just operations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The paper is an extension of a conference paper (Zhang et al 2019), and the new contributions in this paper are summarized as follows:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resource and dependency based test case generation for RESTful Web services

2021

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Nowadays, RESTful web services are widely used for building enterprise applications. REST is not a protocol, but rather it defines a set of guidelines on how to design APIs to access and manipulate resources using HTTP over a network. In this paper, we propose an enhanced search-based method for automated system test generation for RESTful web services, by exploiting domain knowledge on the handling of HTTP resources. The proposed techniques use domain knowledge specific to RESTful web services and a set of effective templates to structure test actions (i.e., ordered sequences of HTTP calls) within an individual in the evolutionary search. The action templates are developed based on the semantics of HTTP methods and are used to manipulate the web services’ resources. In addition, we propose five novel sampling strategies with four sampling methods (i.e., resource-based sampling) for the test cases that can use one or more of these templates. The strategies are further supported with a set of new, specialized mutation operators (i.e., resource-based mutation) in the evolutionary search that take into account the use of these resources in the generated test cases. Moreover, we propose a novel dependency handling to detect possible dependencies among the resources in the tested applications. The resource-based sampling and mutations are then enhanced by exploiting the information of these detected dependencies. To evaluate our approach, we implemented it as an extension to the EvoMaster tool, and conducted an empirical study with two selected baselines on 7 open-source and 12 synthetic RESTful web services. Results show that our novel resource-based approach with dependency handling obtains a significant improvement in performance over the baselines, e.g., up to + 130.7% relative improvement (growing from + 27.9% to + 64.3%) on line coverage.

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“…For white-box testing, it uses several different SBST heuristics like the branch distance, not only applied on the predicates in the control flow of the SUT, but also in all SQL commands executed over a database (if any) [14]. To generate better test cases, EvoMaster can also exploit dependencies among the API resources [57].…”

Section: Evomastermentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing Search-based Testing with Testability Transformations for Existing APIs

ArcuriAndrea

Galeotti

2021

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Search-based software testing (SBST) has been shown to be an effective technique to generate test cases automatically. Its effectiveness strongly depends on the guidance of the fitness function. Unfortunately, a common issue in SBST is the so-called flag problem , where the fitness landscape presents a plateau that provides no guidance to the search. In this article, we provide a series of novel testability transformations aimed at providing guidance in the context of commonly used API calls (e.g., strings that need to be converted into valid date/time objects). We also provide specific transformations aimed at helping the testing of REST Web Services. We implemented our novel techniques as an extension to EvoMaster , an SBST tool that generates system-level test cases. Experiments on nine open-source REST web services, as well as an industrial web service, show that our novel techniques improve performance significantly.

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Resource-based test case generation for RESTful web services

Cited by 29 publications

References 14 publications

EvoMaster: A Search-Based System Test Generation Tool

EvoMaster: A Search-Based System Test Generation Tool

Resource and dependency based test case generation for RESTful Web services

Enhancing Search-based Testing with Testability Transformations for Existing APIs

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