Editorial: Find the missing links?
Derek Yates · Software Testing Verification and Reliability · 2002
Find the missing links?It was during the summer of 2001, in a meeting with Martin Woodward to discuss plans for STVR, that I agreed to write the editorial for this issue of the journal.Later, when I was thinking about what had transpired at the meeting, it came as quite a shock to realize that, I had not, in fact, undertaken the writing of an editorial for STVR for almost exactly two years!Whilst contemplating this fact, and not without some amazement and regret at so swift a passage of the last two years, I determined to revisit briefly the more recent editorials.Upon so doing, the reason for my two-year 'sabbatical' readily became apparent.Over and above editorials addressing such issues as collaboration, specificationbased testing, and changes to STVR and its Editorial Board, each of which was written by one of the 'regular' editors, the journal has been fortunate to entertain a number of Guest Editors.In the December 2000 issue, STVR 10( 4), John Derrick joined Rob Hierons to host a Special Issue on specification-based testing, while in the June 2001 issue, STVR 11(2), four selected papers from the First International Workshop on Automated Program Analysis, Testing and Verification (WAPATV 2000) were introduced by Nigel Tracey, John Penix and Willem Visser, all members of the workshop's programme committee.Most recently, however, Eric Wong edited the December 2001 issue, STVR 11(4), introducing three papers from the symposium Mutation 2000 of which he was the programme chairman.Now, apart from enabling me to come to terms with my (obviously distorted) concept of the passage of time, what has all this to do with this issue of STVR?There are in fact several relevant links.First, in STVR 11(2) (see above), Gerard Holzmann and Margaret Smith presented a paper on what currently is, in a number of circles, a 'hot topic', namely, model checking.The first article in this issue 'keeps this pot boiling' in addressing the issue of efficiency.The paper by Nicola Mazzocca, Antonella Santone, Gigliola Vaglini and ValeriaVittorini is a case study of the use of a methodology for property checking on reduced transition systems in the context of a distributed system (a system for video ondemand).The second paper in this issue, and one that also provides a link to another recent editorial, is a position paper by Rob Hierons, Mark Harman, Chris Fox, Lahcen Ouarbya and Mohammed Daoudi on conditioned slicing.It is noteworthy in a number of ways, including the fact that it is the first position paper to appear in the journal and that it may be viewed as a welcome response to Lee White's request in his editorial of STVR 9(4) for both papers of this kind and letters to the editor (readers may discern yet another link here!).The third and final article in this issue is a paper by István Forgács and Antonia Bertolino that seeks to address the issue of the untestedness syndrome in respect of data-flow based testing criteria.Specifically, it first defines a new data-flow testing criterion that does not display the syndrome, but may require a path set of infinite size to satisfy it.From this criterion, a second one that