Arcadia Papers: ABSTRACT
"An Analysis of Test Data Selection Criteria Using the RELAY Model of
Fault Detection,"
by Debra J. Richardson and Margaret C. Thompson in
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,
SE-19(5):327-344, May 1993.
Abstract
RELAY is a model of faults and failures that defines failure conditions,
which describe test data for which execution will guarantee that a fault
originates erroneous behavior that also transfers through computations and
information flow until a failure is revealed. This model of fault detection
provides a framework within which other testing criteria's capabilities
can be evaluated. In this paper, we analyze three test data selection
criteria that attempt to detect faults in six fault classes. This analysis
shows that none of these criteria is capable of guaranteeing detection for
these fault classes and points out two major weaknesses of these criteria.
The first weakness is that the criteria do not consider the potential
unsatisfiability of their rules; each criterion includes rules that are
sufficient to cause potential failures for some fault classes, yet when
such rules are unsatisfiable, many faults may remain undetected. Their
second weakness is failure to integrate their proposed rules; although a
criterion may cause a subexpression to take on an erroneous value, there
is no effort made to guarantee that the intermediate values cause
observable, erroneous behavior. This paper shows how the RELAY model
overcomes these weaknesses.
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Last modified: Fri Nov 11 14:41:24 1994