Context:

Mutual Information is an information theoretic measure designed to quantify the amount of similarity between two random variables ranging over two sets. In this paper, we adapt this concept and show how it can be used to select a good test suite to test from a Finite State Machine (FSM) based on a maximise diversity approach.

Objective:

The main goal of this paper is to use Mutual Information in order to select test suites to test from FSMs and evaluate whether we obtain better results, concerning the quality of the selected test suite, than current state-of-the-art measures.

Method:

First, we defined our scenario. We considered the case where we receive two (or more) test suites and we have to choose between them. We were interested in this scenario because it is a recurrent case in regression testing. Second, we defined our notion based on Mutual Information: Biased Mutual Information. Finally, we carried out experiments in order to evaluate the measure.

Results:

We obtained experimental evidence that demonstrates the potential value of the measure. We also showed that the time needed to compute the measure is negligible when compare to the time needed to apply extra testing. We compared our measure with a state-of-the-art test selection measure and showed that our proposal outperforms it. Finally, we have compared our measure with a notion of transition coverage. Our experiments showed that our measure is slightly worse than transition coverage, as expected, but its computation is 10 times faster.

Conclusion:

Our experiments showed that Biased Mutual Information is a good measure for selecting test suites, outperforming the current state-of-the-art measure, and having a (negative) correlation to fault coverage. Therefore, we can conclude that our new measure can be used to select the test suite that is likely to find more faults. As a result, it has the potential to be used to automate test generation.

中文翻译：

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使用相互信息从有限状态机进行测试：测试套件的选择

内容：

互信息是一种信息理论量度，旨在量化范围在两个集合上的两个随机变量之间的相似度。在本文中，我们采用了这一概念，并展示了如何使用它来基于最大多样性方法从有限状态机（FSM）中选择一个好的测试套件进行测试。

目的：

本文的主要目标是使用互信息来选择测试套件以从FSM进行测试，并评估我们是否比当前的最新测试方法在选择的测试套件的质量方面获得更好的结果。

方法：

首先，我们定义了方案。我们考虑了以下情况：我们收到两个（或更多）测试套件，我们必须在它们之间进行选择。我们对这种情况很感兴趣，因为这是回归测试中经常发生的情况。其次，我们基于互信息定义了我们的概念：有偏的互信息。最后，我们进行了实验以评估该措施。

结果：

我们获得了实验证据，证明了该措施的潜在价值。我们还表明，与应用额外测试所需的时间相比，计算量度所需的时间可以忽略不计。我们将我们的方法与最新的测试选择方法进行了比较，结果表明我们的建议要优于它。最后，我们将我们的测度与过渡覆盖的概念进行了比较。我们的实验表明，我们的测量比预期的过渡覆盖要差一些，但计算速度要快10倍。

结论：

我们的实验表明，有偏向的互信息是选择测试套件的好方法，其性能优于当前的最新水平，并且与故障覆盖率之间（负）相关。因此，我们可以得出结论，我们的新措施可用于选择可能发现更多故障的测试套件。结果，它具有用于自动生成测试的潜力。