A theory of fault-based testing

Morell, Larry

doi:10.1109/32.57623

Cited by 220 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…At a fundamental level, our approach is related to works by Richardson and Thompson [13], Morell [10], and Voas [19] that describe the conditions under which faults create erroneous states, propagate, and manifest in the output. Our work applies these models to changes instead of faults.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying aggressive propagation-based strategies for testing changes

Santelices

Harrold

2011

2011 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

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Abstract-Test-suite augmentation for evolving softwarethe process of augmenting a test suite to adequately test software changes-is necessary for any program that undergoes modifications as part of its development and maintenance cycles. Recently, we presented a new technique for test-suite augmentation based on leveraging the propagation conditions for the effects of changes. Although empirical studies show that this technique can be quite effective for testing changes, the experiments have been limited because of the complexity of the implementation. In this paper, we present a new and more efficient approach for propagation-based testing of changes that can reach much longer propagation-distances and can focus the testing more precisely on those behaviors of changes that can actually affect the output. Using an implementation of this new approach, we performed a study on a set of changes on Java programs for which we compared, to a much larger extent, our propagation-based strategy with other existing techniques for testing changes. The results of the study not only confirm the superior effectiveness of propagation-based strategies over these other techniques for testing changes, but also quantify that superiority and clarify the conditions under which our approach is most effective.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying aggressive propagation-based strategies for testing changes

Santelices

Harrold

2011

2011 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

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“…In the past, various types of faults have been defined and used to study effectiveness of test criteria; see for example [16,22,25,30,33]. An analysis of various fault classes and the hierarchy among them is presented in [15,27].…”

Section: Types Of Faultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An approach, known as fault based testing [16,22], attempts to alleviate the problem of test-set reliability by seeking a solution through hypothesizing faults that can occur in the implementation. The reliability of a technique is measured in terms of these hypothesized faults.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental evaluation of the tolerance for control‐flow test criteria

Kapoor

Bowen

2004

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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For a given test criterion, the number of test-sets satisfying the criterion may be very large, with varying fault detection effectiveness. In recent work [29], the measure of variation in effectiveness of test criterion was defined as 'tolerance'. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of tolerance for control-flow test criteria. The experimental analysis is done by exhaustive test-set generation, wherever possible, for a given criteria which improves on earlier empirical studies that adopted analysis of some test-sets using random selection techniques. Four industrially used control-flow testing criteria, Condition Coverage (CC), Decision Condition Coverage (DCC), Full Predicate Coverage (FPC) and Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) have been analysed against four types of faults. A new test criteria, Reinforced Condition/Decision Coverage (RC/DC) [28], is also analysed and compared. The Boolean specifications considered were taken from a past research paper and also generated randomly. To ensure that it is the test-set property that influences the effectiveness and not the test-set size, the average test-set size was kept same for all the test criteria except RC/DC. A further analysis of variation in average effectiveness with respect to number of conditions in the decision was also undertaken. The empirical results show that the MC/DC criterion is more reliable and stable when compared to the other considered criteria. Though the number of test-cases is large in RC/DC testsets, no significant improvement in effectiveness and tolerance was observed over MC/DC.

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“…Input validation testing, then, is defined as choosing test data that attempt to show the presence or absence of specific faults pertaining to input-tolerance while exhibiting broad power at the system level. Morell (1990) provided a theory of fault-based testing. He described the arena as a triple <P,S,D> where P is the program, S is the specification , and D is the domain of interest.…”

Section: Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fault-based testing generates test data to demonstrate the absence of a set of prespecified faults (Morell 1990). Similarly, fault-based analysis identifies static techniques (such as traceability analysis ) and even specific activities within those techniques (e.g., perform back-tracing to identify unintended functions) that should be performed to ensure that a set of pre-specified faults do not exist.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Input validation analysis and testing

Hayes

Offutt

2006

Empir Software Eng

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This research addresses the problem of statically analyzing input command syntax as defined in interface and requirements specifications and then generating test cases for dynamic input validation testing. The IVAT (Input Validation Analysis and Testing) technique has been developed, a proof-of-concept tool (MICASA) has been implemented, and a case study validation has been performed. Empirical validation on large-scale industrial software (from the Tomahawk Cruise Missile) shows that as compared with senior, experienced analysts and testers, MICASA found more syntactic requirement specification defects, generated test cases with higher syntactic coverage, and found additional defects. The experienced analysts found more semantic defects than MICASA, and the experienced testers' cases found 7.4 defects per test case as opposed to an average of 4.6 defects found by MICASA test cases. Additionally, the MICASA tool performed at less cost.

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A theory of fault-based testing

Cited by 220 publications

References 23 publications

Applying aggressive propagation-based strategies for testing changes

Applying aggressive propagation-based strategies for testing changes

Experimental evaluation of the tolerance for control‐flow test criteria

Input validation analysis and testing

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