Uncovering Business Logic Bugs via Semantics-Driven Unit Test Generation (Experience Paper)

Business logic bugs violate intended business semantics and are particularly prevalent in enterprise software. Yet most existing unit test generation techniques are code-centric, making such bugs difficult to expose. We present SeGa, a semantics-driven unit test generation technique for uncovering business logic bugs. SeGa constructs a semantic knowledge base from product requirement documents, represented as a set of functionality entries that group related requirements under a common business intent. Given a focal method, SeGa retrieves the relevant functionality entries and derives fine-grained business scenarios with explicit preconditions, triggering actions, expected outcomes, and semantic constraints to guide LLM-based test generation. We evaluate SeGa on four industrial Go projects containing 60 real-world business logic bugs. SeGa detects 22~25 more bugs than four state-of-the-art LLM-based techniques and improves precision by 26.9%~34.3%. Deployment across 6 production repositories further uncovers 16 previously unknown business logic bugs that were confirmed and fixed by developers, demonstrating SeGa's practical value. From our industrial study, we summarize a series of lessons and suggestions for practical use and future research.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering.
Published
2026-10-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3832192
Primary Topic
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Uncovering Business Logic Bugs via Semantics-Driven Unit Test Generation (Experience Paper)

Junjie Chen, Chen Yang
Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering.
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
article

Uncovering Business Logic Bugs via Semantics-Driven Unit Test Generation (Experience Paper)

Junjie Chen, Chen Yang
article en

Abstract

Business logic bugs violate intended business semantics and are particularly prevalent in enterprise software. Yet most existing unit test generation techniques are code-centric, making such bugs difficult to expose. We present SeGa, a semantics-driven unit test generation technique for uncovering business logic bugs. SeGa constructs a semantic knowledge base from product requirement documents, represented as a set of functionality entries that group related requirements under a common business intent. Given a focal method, SeGa retrieves the relevant functionality entries and derives fine-grained business scenarios with explicit preconditions, triggering actions, expected outcomes, and semantic constraints to guide LLM-based test generation. We evaluate SeGa on four industrial Go projects containing 60 real-world business logic bugs. SeGa detects 22~25 more bugs than four state-of-the-art LLM-based techniques and improves precision by 26.9%~34.3%. Deployment across 6 production repositories further uncovers 16 previously unknown business logic bugs that were confirmed and fixed by developers, demonstrating SeGa's practical value. From our industrial study, we summarize a series of lessons and suggestions for practical use and future research.

Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering.Vol. 3(ISSTA)
Tianjin University (CN)
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Openalex Percentile: Top 7%
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
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Uncovering Business Logic Bugs via Semantics-Driven Unit Test Generation (Experience Paper) — Junjie Chen, Chen Yang · Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering. (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS