Unit testing, a common step in software development, presents a challenge. When produced manually, unit test suites are often insufficient to identify defects. The main alternative is to use one of a variety of automatic unit test generation tools: these are able to produce and execute a large number of test inputs that extensively exercise the unit under test. However, without a priori specifications, developers need to manually verify the outputs of these test executions, which is generally impractical. To reduce this cost, unit test selection techniques may be used to help select a subset of automatically generated test inputs.
Then developers can verify their outputs, equip them with test oracles, and put them into the existing test suite. In this paper, we present the operational violation approach for unit test selection, a black-box approach without requiring a priori specifications.

Authors: Tao Xie, David Notkin (Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington)
Published: October, 2003
See also:
Jov (Java Unit Test Selection Tool Based on Operational Violations)
Jusc (Java Unit Test Selection Tool Based on Residual Structural Coverage)