ba-dua (Bitwise Algorithm - powered Definition-Use Association coverage) is an intra-procedural data-flow testing tool for Java programs.
This is an implementation of the bitwise algorithm for data-flow testing proposed in: "An efficient bitwise algorithm for intra-procedural data-flow testing coverage". Published in Information Processing Letters. Volume 113 Issue 8, April, 2013. Pages 293-300.
The implementation is described in: "Data-flow Testing in the Large". Published in IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) 2014.
ba-dua is still an experimental tool. If you are looking for a general purpose coverage tool we recommend JaCoCo. JaCoCo is definitely the best coverage tool for Java. If you are looking for mutation test we recommend PIT. If you don't know what data-flow coverage is, you can read this link.
Version >= 0.3.0 are available at Maven central. Older version can be found at releases page.
To instrument Java classes you should use the instrument program.
java -jar ba-dua-cli-VERSION-all.jar instrument
after instrumentation, you should run the instrumented classes with ba-dua JAR in the classpath.
You can instead of offline instrumentation use the Java agent. Java agent instrument classes as they are loaded by the JVM. Just include ba-dua-agent-rt-VERSION-all.jar in the JVM Java agent option.
After program execution a new file (coverage.ser) will be created in your current directory. You should use the report program to assess the coverage. For default, the program print out the coverage for each class (# of covered DU within the class/# of DU within the class). There is an option -show-methods that will print out the coverage for each method (# of covered DU within the method/# of DU within the method). Alternatively, you can export a XML report with the option -xml. If the classes were compiled with debug information (lines and variables) the XML report will include each actual def-use pair (DU) that are covered or not.
java -jar ba-dua-cli-VERSION-all.jar report
ba-dua is licensed under the Eclipse Public License - v 1.0 (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html)
ba-dua JAR is distributed with some classes from ASM (http://asm.ow2.org), args4j (http://args4j.kohsuke.org) and JaCoCo (http://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/) embedded (shaded). The command line interface tools were inspired by the pull request #86 from JaCoCo.
- ASM is distributed under the BSD License.
- args4j is distributed under the MIT License.
- JaCoCo is distributed under the Eclipse Public License - v 1.0.
Any other included library is of our own and is authorized to be distributed.
During our implementation we relied in part on JaCoCo's code. Any similarity is no mere coincidence.