  Testing is a vital part of the software development process. Test Case
Generation (TCG) is the process of automatically generating a collection of
test cases which are applied to a system under test. White-box TCG is usually
performed by means of symbolic execution, i.e., instead of executing the
program on normal values (e.g., numbers), the program is executed on symbolic
values representing arbitrary values. When dealing with an object-oriented (OO)
imperative language, symbolic execution becomes challenging as, among other
things, it must be able to backtrack, complex heap-allocated data structures
should be created during the TCG process and features like inheritance, virtual
invocations and exceptions have to be taken into account. Due to its inherent
symbolic execution mechanism, we pursue in this paper that Constraint Logic
Programming (CLP) has a promising unexploited application field in TCG. We will
support our claim by developing a fully CLP-based framework to TCG of an OO
imperative language, and by assessing it on a corresponding implementation on a
set of challenging Java programs. A unique characteristic of our approach is
that it handles all language features using only CLP and without the need of
developing specific constraint operators (e.g., to model the heap).

Programming Languages;Software Engineering