40 Years of Computing at Newcastle
Department Technical Report Series No. 564
FAST: A Framework for Automating Statistics-Based Testing.
H-D. Chu and J. Dobson
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1997.
Abstract
To achieve software quality, testing is an essential component in all software development. It involves the execution of a deterministic software system with test data and a comparison of the results with the expected output, which must satisfy the users' requirements. This accounts for over 25% of the cost of a software development. Therefore, automation has considerable potential. The quality programming which was introduced by Cho can automatically generate data for testing, based on a so-called 'SIAD tree' which is used to represent the hierarchical and "network" relation between input elements and also incorporates rules into the tree for using the inputs. However, it lacks a clear framework which would show how automated testing can be achieved. To address this problem, we present a Framework for Automating Statistics-Based Testing (FAST), which is an extension of the testing concept in quality programming to achieve automated testing. In FAST, we propose a SOAD tree which is similar to the structure of the SIAD tree to describe the syntactic structure of the product unit and its defectiveness. Based on this tool, the inspection of test results can be automatically achieved by lexical and syntax analysis. The implementation of automated software testing for Command File Interpreter (CFI) software which incorporates the framework is also described.
Department Technical Report Series - 1997
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Contents Page - 40 Years of Computing at Newcastle
Technical Report Abstract No. 564, 30 June 1997