An Empirical Study on Automated Test Generation Tools for Java: Effectiveness and Challenges

Automated test generation tools enable test automation and further alleviate the problem of low efficiency caused by writing hand-crafted test cases. However, existing automated tools are not mature enough to be widely used by software testing groups. This paper conducts an empirical study on the state-of-the-art automated tools for Java, i.e., EvoSuite, Randoop, JTeXpert, T3, JDoop, and Tardis. We design a test workflow to facilitate the process, which can automatically run tools for test generation, collect data and evaluate various metrics. Furthermore, we conduct empirical analysis on these six tools and their related techniques from different aspects, i.e., code coverage, mutation score, test suite size, readability, and real fault detection ability. We discuss about the benefits and drawbacks of hybrid techniques based on experimental results. Besides, we introduce our experience in setting up and executing these tools, and summarize their usability and user-friendliness. Finally, we give some insights into automated tools in terms of test suite readability improvement, meaningful assertion generation, test suite reduction for random testing tools, and symbolic execution integration.