Java Enterprise Edition Support in Search-Based JUnit Test Generation

Many different techniques and tools for automated unit test generation target the Java programming languages due to its popularity. However, a lot of Java’s popularity is due to its usage to develop enterprise applications with frameworks such as Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) or Spring. These frameworks pose challenges to the automatic generation of JUnit tests. In particular, code units (“beans”) are handled by external web containers (e.g., WildFly and GlassFish). Without considering how web containers initialize these beans, automatically generated unit tests would not represent valid scenarios and would be of little use. For example, common issues of bean initialization are dependency injection, database connection, and JNDI bean lookup. In this paper, we extend the EvoSuite search-based JUnit test generation tool to provide initial support for JEE applications. Experiments on 247 classes (the JBoss EAP tutorial examples) reveal an increase in code coverage, and demonstrate that our techniques prevent the generation of useless tests (e.g., tests where dependencies are not injected).