Objective re-weighting to guide an interactive search based software testing system

Paper in proceeding, 2013

Even hardware-focused industries today develop products where software is both a large and important component. Engineers tasked with developing and integrating these products do not always have a software engineering background. To ensure quality, tools are needed that automate and support software testing while allowing these domain specialists to leverage their knowledge and experience. Search-based testing could be a key aspect in creating an automated tool for supporting testing activities. However, domain specific quality criteria and trade-offs make it difficult to develop a general fitness function a priori, so interaction between domain specialists and such a tool would be critical to its success. In this paper we present a system for interactive search based software testing and investigate a way for domain specialists to guide the search by dynamically re-weighting quality goals. Our empirical investigation shows that objective reweighing can help a human domain specialist interactively guide the search, without requiring specialised knowledge of the system and without sacrificing population diversity.