An Assessment of Techniques for Proving Program Correctness
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
An axiomatic basis for computer programming
Communications of the ACM
A new approach to program testing
Proceedings of the international conference on Reliable software
In defense of program testing or correctness proofs considered harmful
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
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The construction of a reliable computer program requires, in part, a means of verification of its component parts prior to their integration into the overall system. The verification process may consist of building a test harness to exercise or exhaustively test a procedure. This technique is known as dynamic testing. In practice, the application of dynamic testing requires the coding of a special harness for each procedure. This consumes valuable programming time, as much as 50% of the total effort (FAIR78). It is also restrictive because the test harness cannot be easily modified to test aspects of a program which it was not originally designed to test. We have built a facility called IDBUG that reduces the programming effort required to employ dynamic testing by automating the construction of the test harness. Additionally, it provides an interactive test environment which permits more flexible testing. This paper describes IDBUG and discusses our experience in its application to maintenance tasks in a commercial environment. Nyone of the ideas put forth here will be especially novel; dynamic testing as a software testing tool has been in use for some time. What we hope to do is illustrate the beneficial aspects of a particular application of dynamic testing. It is argued that testing should play a more limited role in assuring the reliability of software in light of techniques such as structured coding, top-down design, proof of correctness, etc. (McG075). While it is true that eventually the “art of computer programming” will become the “science of producing correct programs”, we believe that more emphasis must be placed on interim solutions to aid in the construction of reliable software. We present IDBUG as such a solution.