Application of a failure driven test profile in random testing

Random testing techniques have been extensively used in reliability assessment, as well as in debug testing. When used to assess software reliability, random testing selects test cases based on an operational profile; while in the context of debug testing, random testing often uses a uniform distribution. However, generally neither an operational profile nor a uniform distribution is chosen from the perspective of maximizing the effectiveness of failure detection. Adaptive random testing has been proposed to enhance the failure detection capability of random testing by evenly spreading test cases over the whole input domain. In this paper, we propose a new test profile, which is different from both the uniform distribution, and operational profiles. The aim of the new test profile is to maximize the effectiveness of failure detection. We integrate this new test profile with some existing adaptive random testing algorithms, and develop a family of new random testing algorithms. These new algorithms not only distribute test cases more evenly, but also have better failure detection capabilities than the corresponding original adaptive random testing algorithms. As a consequence, they perform better than the pure random testing.