Co-author of Bug Out: Automated Testing of Low-Code Applications

You can find the Research here

Research published in 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing (ICST 2024), 2024.

Description

Low-code platforms enable rapid development of complex mission-critical software applications. Nevertheless, these applications still must adhere to software principals. In particular, the developers need to create tests as part of their development cycle. However, this process involves significant effort from manual testing to manually coding tests. This process can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially for large and complex applications.

In this paper, we propose using symbolic execution to generate tests for low-code applications. Symbolic execution is a technique that allows the exploration of all possible paths of a program, without requiring it to be executed with concrete values. Although symbolic execution has scalability issues due to path explosion, we mitigate the problem by exploring the properties of the low-code framework. We evaluate our approach using a set of real-world low-code applications and compare it to equivalent testing techniques for text-based programming languages. Our results show that symbolic execution can produce high quality results in a short amount of time when applied to visual programming languages. We believe that our approach has the potential to improve the quality and reliability of low-code applications while reducing the time and effort required for testing.