Test data generation

Test data generation, an important part of software testing, is the process of creating a set of data for testing the adequacy of new or revised software applications. It may be the actual data that has been taken from previous operations or artificial data created for this purpose. Test Data Generation is seen to be a complex problem and though a lot of solutions have come forth most of them are limited to toy programs. The use of dynamic memory allocation in most of the code written in industry is the most severe problem that the Test Data Generators face as the usage of the software then becomes highly unpredictable, due to this it becomes harder to anticipate the paths that the program could take making it nearly impossible for the Test Data Generators to generate exhaustive Test Data. However, in the past decade significant progress has been made in tackling this problem better by the use of genetic algorithms and other analysis algorithms. Moreover, Software Testing is an important part of the Software Development Life Cycle and is basically labor intensive. It also accounts for nearly third of the cost of the system development. In this view the problem of generating quality test data quickly, efficiently and accurately is seen to be important.