Publications

Randoop Publications

These papers describe Randoop and its underlying techniques in more detail.

Eclat: Automatic generation and classification of test inputs by Carlos Pacheco and Michael D. Ernst. In ECOOP 2005 -- Object-Oriented Programming, 19th European Conference, (Glasgow, Scotland), 2005. Paper: PDF

• The first paper to present the feedback-directed random test generation, which generates each test, evaluates it, and determines whether to use it as a foundation for more tests. Randoop uses this technique.

Feedback-directed random test generation by Carlos Pacheco, Shuvendu K. Lahiri, Michael D. Ernst, and Thomas Ball. In ICSE '07: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, (Minneapolis, MN, USA), 2007. Paper: PDF Slides: PDF PPT

• The main paper describing feedback-directed random test generation and Randoop, as well as experiments that compare the technique with other test generation techniques.

Randoop: Feedback-directed Random Testing for Java by Carlos Pacheco and Michael D. Ernst. In OOPSLA 2007 Companion, Montreal, Canada, Oct. 2007, ACM.

• A short tool paper describing aspects of the Java version of Randoop.

Finding Errors in .NET with Feedback-directed Random Testing by Carlos Pacheco, Shuvendu K. Lahiri, and Thomas Ball. In ISSTA 2008, Seattle, Washington, 2008. Slides: PDF PPT

• This case study details the use of Randoop at Microsoft (using a .NET version of Randoop). A team of test engineers applied Randoop to a critical .NET component that had been thoroughly tested for years. Still, Randoop found many serious errors.

Directed Random Testing (dissertation). Slides: PDF

Other publications that use or evaluate Randoop

Note: this list is seriously outdated! For a more recent collection of publications take a look at this Google Scholar search. There are 699 results as of 2019-04-26.

The following papers (by other authors) use or evaluate Randoop.

• Predicting Effectiveness of Automatic Testing Tools by Brett Daniel and Marat Boshernitsan. In ASE 2008.
• Predicting and Explaining Automatic Testing Tool Effectiveness by Brett Daniel and Marat Boshernitsan. UIUC Tech Report UIUCDCS-R-2008-2956.
• Improving Structural Testing of Object-Oriented Programs via Integrating Evolutionary Testing and Symbolic Execution by Kobi Inkumsah and Tao Xie. In ASE 2008.
• Making Program Refactoring Safer, by Gustavo Soares, Rohit Gheyi, Dalton Serey, and Tiago Massoni. In IEEE Software, July/August 2010.

Courses that use Randoop

Note: this list is seriously outdated! If you wish to have your course listed here, let us know.

• Software Testing (Spring 2008) at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, taught by Marcelo d'Amorim.
• Reliable Software: Testing and Monitoring (Third term 2008), Caltech, taught by Alex Groce.
• UIUC Topics in Software Engineering (Randoop was used in this course in multiple years).
• Automatic Program Checking, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2010).
• RIO 2011 C5: Automated Test Generation and Repair.
• Automatic Program Checking, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2010, 2011)

.NET version of Randoop

A version of Randoop that works with Microsoft's .NET platform is available at https://github.com/abb-iss/Randoop.NET. Randoop.NET is a from-scratch re-implementation of feedback-directed test generation. The link above is to ABB Corporation's updated version of Randoop.NET. Compared to the original version of Randoop.NET from Microsoft Research:

• It fixes some bugs.
• It adds new features, notably regression assertions for more effective regression testing, method transformers to delete or replace calls to specific methods in the assembly, and richer debug information collection.
• It adds a GUI, as a VS2010 add-in.