Abstract
Many different techniques have been proposed to address the problem of automated test case generation, varying in a range
of properties and resulting in very different test cases. In this paper we investigate the effects of the test case length
on resulting test suites: Intuitively, longer test cases should serve to find more difficult faults but will reduce the number
of test cases necessary to achieve the test objectives. On the other hand longer test cases have disadvantages such as higher
computational costs and they are more difficult to interpret manually. Consequently, should one aim to generate many short
test cases or fewer but longer test cases? We present the results of a set of experiments performed in a scenario of specification
based testing for reactive systems. As expected, a long test case can achieve higher coverage and fault detecting capability
than a short one, while giving preference to longer test cases in general can help reduce the size of test suites but can
also have the opposite effect, for example, if minimization is applied.
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