A Control Flow Graph Generation Method for Java Projects

Abstract

Many software quality assurance methods depend on the control flow graph (CFG) for the
analyzing process. However, existing methods for Java projects have not described details of the CFG
generation process, which is critical for having a fully automatic analysis method. This paper presents
a novel method, named CFG4J, for generating CFG associated with a given Java unit. The generated
CFG will be used in many other software quality assurance methods such as test data generation for
unit testing, unit debugging, code coverage computation, etc. We have implemented CFG4J in a tool
and performed some initial experiments with some common units with potential results. Finally, we
give some discussions about the experimental results at the end of the paper.
Keywords: Control flow graph, unit testing, test data generation, Java projects.