ISSTA

This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Weapons Center

Research on the testing and debugging of distributed real-time programs now focuses on more formal approaches to specification and testing. Temporal logic is a natural candidate for this since it can specify properties of event and state sequences. ...

Comparison of software testing methods is meaningful only if sound theory relates the properties compared to actual software quality. Existing comparisons typically use anecdotal foundations with no necessary relationship to quality, comparing methods ...

Branch testing, which is one of the most widely used methods for program testing, see White [1] for example, involves executing a selected set of program paths in an attempt to exercise all program branches. Criteria for selecting such paths have, to ...

Reliable software testing is a time consuming operation. In addition to the time spent by the tester in identifying, locating, and correcting bugs, a significant time is spent in the execution of the program under test and its instrumented or fault ...

This paper relates experience with building and using a programmable sequencing analyzer based on data flow analysis algorithms. An earlier paper described both the motivation for and the specification of Cecil, a powerful language for defining ...

We describe an approach to software analysis and test generation that combines several technologies: object-oriented databases and parsers for capturing and representing software; pattern languages for writing program templates and querying and ...

Current software testing practices focus, almost exclusively, on the implementation, despite widely acknowledged benefits of testing based on software specifications. We propose approaches to specification-based testing by extending a wide variety of ...

While considerable attention has been given to techniques for developing complex systems as collections of reliable and reusable modules, little is known about testing these modules. In the literature, the special problems of module testing have been ...

A configuration management (CM) tool is supposed to build a consistent software system following incremental changes to the system. The notion of consistency usually is purely syntactic, having to do with the sorts of properties analyzed by compilers. ...

The Inscape Environment research project addresses issues in supporting the development of large systems by large numbers of programmers. One aspect of this research is the “constructive use” of formal module interface specifications - that is, given ...

It is unlikely that any single approach to analysis of concurrent software systems will meet all the needs of software developers throughout the development process. Thus, experimental evaluation of different analysis techniques is needed to determine ...

Fault-based testing strategies test software by focusing on specific, common types of errors. The coupling effect states that test data sets that detect simple types of faults are sensitive enough to detect more complex types of faults. This paper ...

This paper reports on some experiments which compare three system test strategies which were applied to artificial software systems. The artificial systems were seeded with known defects and then tested according to the three strategies which involved ...

As current trends in programming encourage a high degree of modularity, the number of procedure calls and returns executed in a module continues to grow. This increase in procedures mandates the efficient testing of the interactions among procedures. In ...

This paper presents a formal, general model of program dependencies. Two generalizations of control and data dependence, called weak and strong syntactic dependence, are presented. Some of the practical implications of program dependencies are ...

The all-du-paths software testing criterion is the most discriminating of the data flow testing criteria of Rapps and Weyuker. Unfortunately, in the worst case, the criterion requires an exponential number of test cases. To investigate the practicality ...

This paper describes the application of behavior specifications to the testing of tasking supervisors, an important component of an implementation of a concurrent programming language. The goal of such testing is to determine whether or not a tasking ...

The inherent difficulties of analyzing concurrent software make reliance on a single technique or a single monolithic tool unsatisfactory. A better approach is to apply multiple analysis and verification techniques by coordinating the activities of a ...

TSL is a language for writing formal test specifications of the functions of a software system. The test specifications are compiled into executable test scripts that establish test environments, assign values to input variables, perform necessary setup ...

Integration of multiple testing techniques is required to demonstrate high quality of software. Technique integration has four basic goals: reduced development costs, incremental testing capabilities, extensive error detection, and cost-effective ...