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A Testability Transformation Approach for Programs with Assertions

Authors:
Ali Alakeel

Keywords: assertion-based software testing; testability transformation; software testing; data dependency analysis

Abstract:
Assertion-Based software testing has been shown to be effective in detecting program faults as compared to traditional black-box and white-box software testing methods; however in the presence of large numbers of assertions this approach may be very expensive. As reported in the literature, Assertion-Based software testing executes the whole program based on a given input data in order to find an assertion’s violation. Executing the whole program for every assertion may be very costly especially for large programs with very larger number of assertions. The cost is related to search time required during the process of generating test input data to violate such large number of assertions. This paper introduces a testability transformation approach based on the analysis of control and data flow dependencies that affect the execution of every assertion in the program. It achieves this by eliminating program statements that do not lead the program flow control to the assertion under consideration. A small case study is presented, which demonstrates the value of the proposed approach.

Pages: 9 to 13

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4316

ISBN: 978-1-61208-370-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014