Evolutionary testing (ET), automatically generating test data with good quality, is an effective technique based on evolutionary algorithm. However, the presence of flag variables will make it degenerate to random testing in structural testing. Much of previous work has addressed this problem, but all can be characterized as program-specific. In this paper, flag cost function is introduced as the main component of fitness function, whose value changes with the variation of flag problem. Based on this, a unified fitness calculation rule for flag conditions is proposed. The experiments on programs with flag problems, once considered as inextricable in previous work, and the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) code showed the effectiveness of our unified approach.

The authors report on their work to introduce the reflective architecture in a popular compilation-based language, C++, without modifying the compiler. The reflective architecture provides a disciplined split between the object level and the meta-object level in a class-based form. The unit of causal connections is the class member function. Mechanisms based on the methods diversion are constructed to support a kind of implicitly causal connection. A delegation mechanism is constructed for sharing meta-methods whose classes are not designed as having inheritance. A prototype has been constructed in the Advantage C++ 1.1 M4 running on MSDOS.>