Test-Case Generation for Data Flow Testing of Smart Contracts Based on Improved Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

Smart contracts are commonly deployed for safety-critical applications, the quality assurance of which has been a vital factor. Test cases are standard means to ensure the correctness of data flows in smart contracts. To more efficiently generate test cases with high coverage, we propose an improved genetic algorithm-based test-case generation approach for smart contract data flow testing. Our approach introduces the theory of particle swarm optimization into the genetic algorithm, which reduces the influence brought by the randomness of genetic operations and enhances its capability to find global optima. A set of 30 real smart contracts deployed on Ethereum and GitHub is collected to perform the experimental study, on which our approach is compared with three baseline approaches. The experimental results show that, in most cases, the coverage of the test cases generated by our approach is significantly higher than the baseline approaches with relatively lower numbers of iterations and lower execution time.