Selection of software testing method by using ARAS method

The accelerated development of informatics and computing in the last decades has led software to become present in all segments of the society. When the presence and value of software began to grow, software testing has become a very important activity in software development. Software has become indispensable in the economy, education, healthcare, communications, the media, politics, etc. Software errors can cause huge pecuniary damages, as well as non-material losses (reputation, honour ...) so they must be eliminated as early as possible. It is important to recognize the importance of software testing as a basic phase in the software development cycle. Testing helps in reducing the risk of product failure and ensures that the product meets business and technical requirements. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to present an approach based on multiple-criteria decision-making methods in the selection of software testing method. For the selection of alternatives, in our case software testing methods, Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) method is applied. Applicability, usability and efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated on conducted illustrative example of selection of software testing method

Optimizing compilation with preservation of structural code coverage metrics to support software testing

Code-coverage-based testing is a widely-used testing strategy with the aim of providing a meaningful decision criterion for the adequacy of a test suite. Code-coverage-based testing is also mandated for the development of safety-critical applications; for example, the DO178b document requires the application of the modified condition/decision coverage. One critical issue of code-coverage testing is that structural code coverage criteria are typically applied to source code whereas the generated machine code may result in a different code structure because of code optimizations performed by a compiler. In this work, we present the automatic calculation of coverage profiles describing which structural code-coverage criteria are preserved by which code optimization, independently of the concrete test suite. These coverage profiles allow to easily extend compilers with the feature of preserving any given code-coverage criteria by enabling only those code optimizations that preserve it. Furthermore, we describe the integration of these coverage profile into the compiler GCC. With these coverage profiles, we answer the question of how much code optimization is possible without compromising the error-detection likelihood of a given test suite. Experimental results conclude that the performance cost to achieve preservation of structural code coverage in GCC is rather low.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Using formal methods to support testing

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing