An Automated Program Testing Methodology and Its Implementation
Abstract
Challenges for the 80's include 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 few tools exist 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. We are just concluding research directed toward rectifying this lack by combining an existing automated test case generation and evaluation technique with the use of executable assertions to provide a means of automatically assessing the test results. Since the violations of assertions can act as a common denominator to any application, this method may be applied to any test object. This method goes one step farther even than the traditional hardware testing methods, because it also has the capability to automatically generate new test cases 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
- Oct 03, 1980
- Accession Number
- ADA217580
Entities
People
- D. M. Andrews
- J. P. Benson