NDLI: A preliminary experiment in automated software testing

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Volume 6, Issue 5, October 1981

Volume 6, Issue 4, August 1981

Volume 6, Issue 3, July 1981

Retrospective introduction to VERkshop II

Introductory comments

A view of verification technology

Toward building verified, secure systems

A mechanical verification of the Alternating Bit Protocol

A verified encrypted packet interface

High-level theories

Research avenues verification is not pursuing, but may be should be

Program verification at Stanford

Recent SRI work in verification

Experience in writing VCG systems

More thoughts on specification and verification

Status of ongoing security-relevant projects

Applications of FDM to KVM and COS/NFE

An avenue for exploitation and development of verification technology

FACC activities/positions in methodology, verification, and trusted systems

A practical verification system

Recent verification work at MITRE

Program verification at Texas Instruments

VERking in constructive set theory

An untitled Canada goose

On verification targets

Lastig gepreek uit nuenen

Response to Philip Miller's letter

Two books named "Software reliability"

A preliminary experiment in automated software testing

Comparisons of quality metrics

System attribute specification

Abstracts in software engineering

Volume 6, Issue 2, April 1981

Volume 6, Issue 1, January 1981

A preliminary experiment in automated software testing

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Benson, Jeoff
Abstract	If a method were discovered for automatically testing computer programs for errors, software development costs could be substantially reduced. This paper describes an experiment performed as part of an effort to develop such a method.The approach is to insert in the program to be tested a number of "executable assertions," statements about the program that trigger error signals whenever they are evaluated to be false (violated). Test cases are developed by systematically selecting values for the input variables of the program. When the program is run, a plot is generated of the number of assertions violated versus the values of the input variables. The resulting function is termed an "error function" and the range of the function is called the "error space" of the program. Maximum values of the error function correspond to input variables which cause the most errors to occur in the program. The value of the error function indicates whether the program executed successfully without the need of examining the output of the program in detail.In the experiment, a program was tested using this technique. The results showed that the error function did not contain singularities and was well-behaved. The technique also revealed an error in the test program which had not been discovered in previous testing. These results indicate that it may be possible to apply standard techniques for maximizing functions in order to locate the values in a program's input space which cause the most errors to occur. A major unresolved problem however is the development of assertions which accurately describe the desired behavior of the program under test.
Starting Page	68
Ending Page	75
Page Count	8
File Format	PDF
ISSN	01635948
DOI	10.1145/1010832.1010860
Journal	ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (SOEN)
Volume Number	6
Issue Number	3
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1979-04-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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