Fault classes and error detection capability of specification-based testing

  • Authors:

  • D. Richard Kuhn

  • Affiliations:

  • National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Some varieties of specification-based testing rely upon methods for generating test cases from predicates in a software specification. These methods derive various test conditions from logic expressions, with the aim of detecting different types of faults. Some authors have presented empirical results on the ability of specification-based test generation methods to detect failures. This article describes a method for cokmputing the conditions that must be covered by a test set for the test set to guarantee detection of the particular fault class. It is shown that there is a coverage hierarchy to fault classes that is consistent with, and may therefore explain, experimental results on fault-based testing. The method is also shown to be effective for computing MCDC-adequate tests.