Search-based testing in financial applications
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Date
2017-05
Authors
Almasi, Mohammad Moein
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
Abstract
Automated unit test generation has been extensively studied in the literature in recent
years. Previous studies on open source systems have shown that test generation
tools are quite effective at detecting faults, but how effective and applicable are
they in an industrial application? In this thesis, this question is investigated in two
phases. In the first phase, I empirically investigate the effectiveness and applicability of
existing automated unit test generation tools and techniques in an industrial financial
application known as LifeCalc which is a life insurance products calculator engine
owned by SEB Life & Pension Holding AB Riga Branch.
In the second phase, I focus more on the software characteristics of financial
application domain. In this domain, many legacy applications exist as a collection
of formulas implemented in spreadsheets. These legacy code, at some point, will be
migrated to more modern development environment. However, migration of such
code to a full-edged system is an error-prone process. While small differences in the
outputs of numerical calculations produced by the two artifacts are tolerable, large
discrepancies could have serious financial implications. Therefore, in this phase, I
introduce a novel specialized search-based unit test generation technique that seeks to
uncover the deviation failures in the migrated code automatically.
Description
Keywords
Search-based testing, Spreadsheet, Automated test generation, Deviation failure, Financial applications, Software testing
Citation
Almasi, M. Moein, et al. "An Industrial Evaluation of Unit Test Generation: Finding Real Faults in a Financial Application." Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track. IEEE Press, 2017.