JCrasher: an automatic robustness tester for Java

• Published in: Software, practice & experience practice & experience, 2004-09, Vol.34 (11), p.1025-1050
• Main Authors: Csallner, Christoph, Smaragdakis, Yannis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Java; random testing; software testing; state re-initialization; test case generation
• ISSN: 0038-0644; 1097-024X
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.602

JCrasher is an automatic robustness testing tool for Java code. JCrasher examines the type information of a set of Java classes and constructs code fragments that will create instances of different types to test the behavior of public methods under random data. JCrasher attempts to detect bugs by causing the program under test to ‘crash’, that is, to throw an undeclared runtime exception. Although in general the random testing approach has many limitations, it also has the advantage of being completely automatic: o supervision is required except for off‐line inspection of the test ases that have caused a crash. Compared to other similar commercial and research tools, JCrasher offers several novelties: it transitively analyzes methods, determines the size of each tested method's parameter‐space and selects parameter combinations and therefore test cases at random, taking into account the time allocated for testing; it defines heuristics for determining whether a Java exception should be considered as a program bug or whether the JCrasher supplied inputs have violated the code's preconditions; it includes support for efficiently undoing all the state changes introduced by previous tests; it produces test files for JUnit, a popular Java testing tool; and it can be integrated in the Eclipse IDE. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.