An experimental comparison of the effectiveness of branch testing and data flow testing

An experiment comparing the effectiveness of the all-uses and all-edges test data adequacy criteria is discussed. The experiment was designed to overcome some of the deficiencies of previous software testing experiments. A large number of test sets was randomly generated for each of nine subject pro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on software engineering Vol. 19; no. 8; pp. 774 - 787
Main Authors Frankl, P.G., Weiss, S.N.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, NY IEEE 01.08.1993
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IEEE Computer Society
Subjects
Acoustic testing
Applied sciences
Comparative analysis
Computer science
Computer science; control theory; systems
Data analysis
Error correction
Errors
Exact sciences and technology
Experiments
Genetic mutations
Hypothesis testing
Language processing and microprogramming
Logistics
Performance evaluation
Random number generation
Regression analysis
Software
Software quality
Software testing
Studies
Systems analysis
Testing
Measurement
Program
Test
Analysis
Error detection
Software
Comparative study
Data flow
Software engineering
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Summary:An experiment comparing the effectiveness of the all-uses and all-edges test data adequacy criteria is discussed. The experiment was designed to overcome some of the deficiencies of previous software testing experiments. A large number of test sets was randomly generated for each of nine subject programs with subtle errors. For each test set, the percentages of executable edges and definition-use associations covered were measured, and it was determined whether the test set exposed an error. Hypothesis testing was used to investigate whether all-uses adequate test sets are more likely to expose errors than are all-edges adequate test sets. Logistic regression analysis was used to investigate whether the probability that a test set exposes an error increases as the percentage of definition-use associations or edges covered by it increases. Error exposing ability was shown to be strongly positively correlated to percentage of covered definition-use associations in only four of the nine subjects. Error exposing ability was also shown to be positively correlated to the percentage of covered edges in four different subjects, but the relationship was weaker.< >
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ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/32.238581