Software testing is process for improving the quality of software by removing all sorts of errors before deployment of software system. The quality of the testing also depends on the test data used for the testing. If the test data cover all the statements and branches of a source program, then it increases the chances of revealing most of the errors from the given program. Normally test data is selected by tester based on his past experience of similar projects. This is time consuming and person oriented approach. Automation of this process can make the testing efficient, cost-effective and reliable. So we present here the Effective Search Based Algorithm (ESBA) which automatically generates test data to reveal the errors at structural test. Here we used branch distance as the optimization function to generate the test data. We applied this method on three benchmark programs to generate the test data. The experimental results indicate that our method outperforms genetic algorithm, many objective sorting algorithm based upon following criteria: average statement coverage 0.91, average branch coverage 0.84 and the average number of evaluations 23824.

Automated Software Testing, Automated Test Data Generation, Structural Testing,, Search based Algorithm, Branch Coverage

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