Experiments on the effectiveness of dataflow- andcontrol-flow-based test adequacy criteria
Hutchins, M.; Foster, H.; Goradia, T.; Ostrand, T.
Software Engineering, 1994. Proceedings. ICSE-16., 16th International Conference on
Volume , Issue , 16-21 May 1994 Page(s):191 - 200
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ICSE.1994.296778
Summary:This paper reports an experimental study investigating the
effectiveness of two code-based test adequacy criteria for identifying
sets of test cases that detect faults. The all-edges and all-DUs
(modified all-uses) coverage criteria were applied to 130 faulty program
versions derived from seven moderate size base programs by seeding
realistic faults. We generated several thousand test sets for each
faulty program and examined the relationship between fault detection and
coverage. Within the limited domain of our experiments, test sets
achieving coverage levels over 90% usually showed significantly better
fault detection than randomly chosen test sets of the same size. In
addition, significant improvements in the effectiveness of
coverage-based tests usually occurred as coverage increased from 90% to
100%. However the results also indicate that 100% code coverage alone is
not a reliable indicator of the effectiveness of a test set. We also
found that tests based respectively on control-flow and dataflow
criteria are frequency complementary in their effectiveness
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