An Automated Program Testing Methodology and Its Implementation.
Abstract
One of the themes emphasized at recent conferences is that new methods for testing and system development are going to be necessary to keep up with the trends of the future. Specifically cited as challenges for the 80's were the need to make software less labor intensive and the need for automated programming tools. The testing phase is one area where there are automated tools which subject software to static tests, but there exist few tools which automate the process of testing a program dynamically. Unlike hardware testing where a test pattern may be automatically stepped through and the test results evaluated by comparison with a 'gold unit', software has had no similar testing capability. This method goes one step farther even than the traditional hardware testing methods, because it also has the capability to automatically generate new testcases by perturbing the input values in accordance with an automated 'intelligent' evaluation of the past performance of a sequence of inputs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1980
- Accession Number
- ADA085404
Entities
People
- D. M. Andrews
- J. P. Benson