A Historical Perspective on Runtime Assertion Checking in Software Development

This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information

Software process modelling as relationships between tasks

Systematic formulation of software process models is currently a challenging problem in software engineering. We present an approach to define models covering the phases of specification, design, implementation and testing of software systems in the component programming framework, taking into account non-functional aspects of software (efficiency, etc.), automatic reusability of implementations in systems and also prototyping techniques involving both specifications and implementations. Our proposal relies on the identification of a catalogue of tasks that appear during these phases which satisfy some relationships concerning their order of execution. A software process model can be defined as the addition of more relationships over these tasks using a simple, modular process language. We have developed also a formal definition of correctness of a software development with respect to a software process model, based on the formulation of models as graphs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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