On detecting faults for Boolean expressions

Abstract

Fault based testing aims at detecting hypothesized faults based on specifications or program source. There are some fault based techniques for testing Boolean expressions which are commonly used to model conditions in specifications as well as logical decisions in program source. The MUMCUT strategy has been proposed to generate test cases from Boolean expressions. Moreover, it detects eight common types of hypothesized faults provided that the original expression is in irredundant disjunctive normal form, IDNF. Software practitioners are more likely to write the conditions and logical decisions in general form rather than IDNF. Hence, it is interesting to investigate the fault detecting capability of the MUMCUT strategy with respect to general form Boolean expressions. In this article, we perform empirical studies to investigate the fault detection capability of the MUMCUT strategy with respect to general form Boolean expressions as well as mutated expressions. A mutated expression can be obtained from the original given Boolean expression by making a syntactic change based on a particular type of fault.

Evaluating and Comparing Fault-Based Testing Strategies for General Boolean Specifications: A Series of Experiments

“…To be practical, there should not be any restriction on the form of a Boolean specification. As observed in our previous work [7], a single fault in a general Boolean expression can give rise to a very large number of faults in the equivalent expression of IDNF. So far, little work has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the IDNF-oriented testing strategies on detecting faults in general Boolean expressions [33].…”

“…A very precise definition of every fault type is provided in [32]. In this study, we used ten types of faults for general Boolean expressions in our previous work [7]. We described the ten types of faults (illustrated by the previous example ab + bc, except for the POF fault) as follows.…”

“…We further analysed why the five patterns of faults cannot be detected by MUMCUT, and proposed extensions [34]. We further investigated the effectiveness of MUMCUT using randomly generated Boolean expressions [7], but have not compared MUMCUT with other testing methods. In this work, we took one step further to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of representative fault-based (syntactic) test case generation strategies when they are used for general Boolean expressions.…”

“…For decades, a lot of efforts have been made on how to efficiently test Boolean specifications [18,40,38,6,7]. Weyuker et al [40] proposed a family of test case generation strategies, namely, MIN, ONE, MANY-A, MANY-B, MAX-A, and MAX-B.…”

Prioritizing MCDC test cases by spectral analysis of Boolean functions

“…return T vary from 5 to 14 variables. They were first introduced by Weyuker et.al [37] and have been commonly used as a benchmark for test generation techniques [15,25,26,37,38]. According to the table, there exist 14 conditions and 20 decisions.…”