40 Years of Computing at Newcastle

Department Technical Report Series No. 584

SITE: A Statistics-based Integrated Test Environment

H-D Chu and J.E. Dobson

University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1997.

Abstract

The production of high-quality information applications to secure the reliability of software is a very important issue in information system development. An essential component for developing quality software is software testing. However, it is a very time-consuming and tedious activity and accounts for over 30% of the cost of software development. In addition to its high cost, manual testing is unpopular and often inconsistently executed. Therefore, a powerful environment that automates testing and analysis techniques is needed. This paper presents a Statistics-based Integrated Test Environment, SITE, which supports statistics-based testing on the top of specification-based testing with two main issues in software testing, when to stop testing and how good the software is after testing. It provides automatic support for test execution by the test driver, test development by the SIAD/SOAD tree editor and the test data generator, test failure analysis by the test results validator, test measurement by the statistical analyst, test management by the test manager and test planning by the modeller. These tools are integrated around an object management system which includes a public, shared data model describing the data entities and relationships which are manipulable by these tools.

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Technical Report Abstract No. 584, 30 June 1997