During the past decades, the complexity of compilers has grown much and so
has the importance of testing them. Compiler is essentially a software tool, and
hence its testing should fulfill all the software testing criteria. Testing is the
process of finding errors in an application by executing it. It is one of the essential
and most time consuming phases of software development. Hence a lot of effort
is directed to fully automate this process, making it more reliable, repeatable,
less time consuming, less boring, and less expensive. Test cases for compiler
should be generated so that they cover all possible valid and invalid input
conditions. One of the major problems in generating test cases is the
completeness of coverage, and the potentially unfeasible size of the generated
test data. The test data for compilers should ideally cover all the syntax and
semantic rules of the language in all possible combinations and in all possible
contexts. When generating test cases for a compiler, the grammar act as the
foundation as it defines the language for which the compiler is being built. In this
research we addressed the issue of automatic generation of test data for parsers
by implementing Purdom's algorithm in Java and C++ and generating test data
for MAGS compiler.
