Leveraging Cross-Coverage of Equivalent Programs for Test Suite Augmentation
Antonia Bertolino, Guglielmo De Angelis, Félicita Di Giandomenico, Francesca Lonetti · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · 2025
In software testing, test suite augmentation refers to the activity of adding new test cases to an existing test suite to enhance its effectiveness, particularly in terms of code coverage and fault detection. In this work, we address the problem of test suite augmentation and propose to leverage implementation dependent test cases that are generated from the coverage of equivalent programs. Specifically, we define cross-coverage testing and cross-coverage test suite augmentation as well as their reference scenarios. Also, we empirically investigate cross-coverage test suite augmentation against two different subjects: a reference benchmark of functionally equivalent programs, and a real-world case study in the context of XACML-based access control systems. Our results show an improvement of the thoroughness of our cross-coverage augmented test suite, as well as of its fault-detection effectiveness, outperforming existing test augmentation strategies.