Work

Formal program testing

Year: 1981

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: This paper proposes a practical alternative to program verification -- called formal program testing -- with similar, but less ambitious goals. Like a program verifier, a formal testing system takes a program annotated with formal specifications as input, generates the corresponding verification conditions, and passes them through a simplifier. After the simplification step, however, a formal testing system simply evaluates the verification conditions on a representative set of test data instead of trying to prove them. Formal testing provides strong evidence that a program is correct, but does not guarantee it. The strength of the evidence depends on the adequacy of the test data.

Source: ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL)

DOI: 10.1145/567532.567546

Author: Robert Cartwright

Institution: Rice University

Language: English

Topic: Software Testing and Debugging Techniques

Subfield: Software

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

OpenAlex ID: W2001243245

FWCI: 0.689

Cites: 20

Cited by: 16

Related to: 10