Testing for Design Faults
Bernhard K. Aichernig, Jifeng He · 2005
Existing theories of testing focus on verification. Their strategy is to cover a specification or a program text to a certain degree in order to raise the confidence in the correctness of a system under test. We take a different approach in the sense that we present a theory of fault-based testing. Fault-based testing uses test data designed to demonstrate the absence of a set of pre-specified faults. Here, the focus is on falsification. The presented theory of testing is integrated into Hoare & He’s theory of programming. As a result, two new test case generation techniques for detecting anticipated faults are presented: one is based on the semantic level of design specifications, the other on the algebraic properties of a programming language.