Search-based testing of procedural programs: Iterative single-target or multi-target approach?

In the context of testing of Object-Oriented (OO) software systems, researchers have recently proposed search based approaches to automatically generate whole test suites by considering simultaneously all targets (e.g., branches) defined by the coverage criterion (multi-target approach). The goal of whole suite approaches is to overcome the problem of wasting search budget that iterative single-target approaches (which iteratively generate test cases for each target) can encounter in case of infeasible targets. However, whole suite approaches have not been implemented and experimented in the context of procedural programs. In this paper we present OCELOT (Optimal Coverage sEarch-based tooL for sOftware Testing), a test data generation tool for C programs which implements both a state-of-the-art whole suite approach and an iterative single-target approach designed for a parsimonious use of the search budget. We also present an empirical study conducted on 35 open-source C programs to compare the two approaches implemented in OCELOT. The results indicate that the iterative single-target approach provides a higher efficiency while achieving the same or an even higher level of coverage than the whole suite approach.