Automated Test Generation for Medical Rules Web Services: A Case Study at the Cancer Registry of Norway
share
The Cancer Registry of Norway (CRN) collects, curates, and manages data related to cancer patients in Norway, supported by an interactive, human-in-the-loop, socio-technical decision support software system. Automated software testing of this software system is inevitable; however, currently, it is limited in CRN's practice. To this end, we present an industrial case study to evaluate an AI-based system-level testing tool, i.e., EvoMaster, in terms of its effectiveness in testing CRN's software system. In particular, we focus on GURI, CRN's medical rule engine, which is a key component at the CRN. We test GURI with EvoMaster's black-box and white-box tools and study their test effectiveness regarding code coverage, errors found, and domain-specific rule coverage. The results show that all EvoMaster tools achieve a similar code coverage; i.e., around 19 number of errors; i.e., 1 in GURI's code. Concerning domain-specific coverage, EvoMaster's black-box tool is the most effective in generating tests that lead to applied rules; i.e., 100 25.81 86.84 rules pass, and 1.70 the validation rules fail. We further observe that the results are consistent across 10 versions of the rules. Based on these results, we recommend using EvoMaster's black-box tool to test GURI since it provides good results and advances the current state of practice at the CRN. Nonetheless, EvoMaster needs to be extended to employ domain-specific optimization objectives to improve test effectiveness further. Finally, we conclude with lessons learned and potential research directions, which we believe are generally applicable.
READ FULL TEXT