Gender-Based Deep Learning Firefly Optimization Method for Test Data Generation

Software testing is a widespread validation means of software quality assurance in industry. Intelligent optimization algorithms have been proved to be an effective way of automatic test data generation. Firefly algorithm has received extensive attention and been widely used to solve optimization problems because of less parameters and simple implement. To overcome slow convergence rate and low accuracy of the firefly algorithm, a novel firefly algorithm with deep learning is proposed to generate structural test data. Initially, the population is divided into male subgroup and female subgroup. Following the randomly attracted model, each male firefly will be attracted by another randomly selected female firefly to focus on global search in whole space. Each female firefly implements local search under the leadership of the general center firefly, constructed based on historical experience with deep learning. At the final period of searching, chaos search is conducted near the best firefly to improve search accuracy. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better performance in terms of success coverage rate, coverage time, and diversity of solutions.