Abstract One of the time-consuming and expensive phases in software development is software testing, which is used to improve the quality of software systems. Therefore, Software test automation is a helpful technique that can alleviate testing time. Several techniques based on evolutionary and heuristic algorithms have been put forth to produce maximum coverage test sets. The primary shortcomings of earlier methods are inconsistent outcomes, insufficient branch coverage, and low fault-detection rates. Increasing branch coverage rate, defect detection rate, success rate, and stability are the primary goals of this research. A time- and cost-effective method has been suggested in this research to produce test data automatically by utilizing machine learning and horse herd optimization algorithms. In the first stage of the proposed method, the suggested machine learning classification model identifies the non-error-propagating instructions of the input program using machine learning algorithms. In the second stage, a test generator was suggested to cover only the program's fault-propagating instructions. The main characteristics of produced test data are avoiding the coverage of non-error-propagating instructions, maximizing the coverage of error-propagating instructions, maximizing success rate, and the fault discovery capability. Several experiments have been performed using nine standard benchmark programs. In the first stage, the suggested instruction classifier provides 90% accuracy and 82% precision. In the second stage, according to the results, the produced test data by the suggested method cover 99.93% of the error-prone instructions. The average success percentage with this method was 98.93%. The suggested method identifies roughly 89.40% of the injected faults by mutation testing tools.

Abstract SQL injection is one of the important security issues in web applications because it allows an attacker to interact with the application's database. SQL injection attacks can be detected using machine learning algorithms. The effective features should be employed in the training stage to develop an optimal classifier with optimal accuracy. Identifying the most effective features is an NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem. Feature selection is the process of selecting the training dataset's smallest and most effective features. The main objective of this study is to enhance the accuracy, precision, and sensitivity of the SQLi detection method. In this study, an effective method to detect SQL injection attacks has been proposed. In the first stage, a specific training dataset consisting of 13 features was prepared. In the second stage, two different binary versions of the Gray-Wolf algorithm were developed to select the most effective features of the dataset. The created optimal datasets were used by different machine learning algorithms. Creating a new SQLi training dataset with 13 numeric features, developing two different binary versions of the gray wolf optimizer to optimally select the features of the dataset, and creating an effective and efficient classifier to detect SQLi attacks are the main contributions of this study. The results of the conducted tests indicate that the proposed SQL injection detector obtain 99.68% accuracy, 99.40% precision, and 98.72% sensitivity. The proposed method increases the efficiency of attack detection methods by selecting 20% of the most effective features.