Generating Tests to Analyse Dynamically-Typed Programs

Abstract

The increasing popularity of dynamically-typed programming languages, such as JavaScript or Python, requires specific support methods for developers to avoid pitfalls arising from the dynamic nature of these languages. Static analyses are frequently used but the dynamic type systems limit their applicability. Dynamic analyses, in contrast, depend on the execution of the code under analysis, and thus depend on the quality of existing tests. This quality of the test suite can be improved by the use of automated test generation but automated test generation for dynamically-typed programming languages itself is hard due to the lack of type information in the programs. The limitations of each of these approaches will be overcome by iteratively combining test generation with static and dynamic analysis techniques for dynamically-typed programs.