Automated unit-level testing with heuristic rules

Software testing plays a significant role in the development of complex software systems. Current testing methods generally require significant effort to generate meaningful test cases. The QUEST/Ada system is a prototype system designed using CLIPS to experiment with expert system based test case generation. The prototype is designed to test for condition coverage, and attempts to generate test cases to cover all feasible branches contained in an Ada program. This paper reports on heuristics sued by the system. These heuristics vary according to the amount of knowledge obtained by preprocessing and execution of the boolean conditions in the program

The development of a program analysis environment for Ada

A unit level, Ada software module testing system, called Query Utility Environment for Software Testing of Ada (QUEST/Ada), is described. The project calls for the design and development of a prototype system. QUEST/Ada design began with a definition of the overall system structure and a description of component dependencies. The project team was divided into three groups to resolve the preliminary designs of the parser/scanner: the test data generator, and the test coverage analyzer. The Phase 1 report is a working document from which the system documentation will evolve. It provides history, a guide to report sections, a literature review, the definition of the system structure and high level interfaces, descriptions of the prototype scope, the three major components, and the plan for the remainder of the project. The appendices include specifications, statistics, two papers derived from the current research, a preliminary users' manual, and the proposal and work plan for Phase 2

A Linux-based Lab for Operating Systems and Network Courses

Introduction We describe our experiences installing and using a teaching laboratory based on the Linux operating system. The lab is a platform for undergraduate operating systems and networking education in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Auburn University. We have deliberately made the software and hardware environments of the lab quite heterogeneous, but Linux has always been the workhorse of the lab. Linux was chosen primarily due to the wide range of hardware supported, the sophistication of its kernel, and the availability of source code and documentation. The authors believe that "hands-on" experience is an essential component of computer science education, and that most current curricula rely far too heavily on simulation when teaching systems issues. 2 Teaching Systems Programming Our primary motivation for building this laboratory was that we not shortchange our students when it comes to practical experience with systems programmi

Insurance and Quality of Care for Adults with Acute Asthma

OBJECTIVE: The relationship between health care insurance and quality of medical care remains incompletely studied. We sought to determine whether type of patient insurance is related to quality of care and subsequent outcomes for patients who arrive in the emergency department (ED) for acute asthma. DESIGN: Using prospectively collected data from the Multicenter Airway Research Collaboration, we compared measures of quality of pre-ED care, acute severity, and short-term outcomes across 4 insurance categories: managed care, indemnity, Medicaid, and uninsured. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Emergency departments at 57 academic medical centers enrolled 1,019 adults with acute asthma. RESULTS: Patients with managed care ranked first and uninsured patients ranked last on all 7 unadjusted quality measures. After controlling for covariates, uninsured patients had significantly lower quality of care than indemnity patients for 5 of 7 measures and had lower initial peak expiratory flow rates than indemnity insured patients. Patients with managed care insurance were more likely than indemnity-insured patients to identify a primary care physician and report using inhaled steroids in the month prior to arrival in the ED. Patients with Medicaid insurance were more likely than indemnity-insured patients to use the ED as their usual source of care for problems with asthma. We found no differences in patient outcomes among the insurance categories we studied. CONCLUSIONS: Uninsured patients had consistently poorer quality of care and than insured patients. Despite differences in indicators of quality of care between types of insurance, we found no differences in short-term patient outcomes by type of insurance