A coverage analysis tool for the effectiveness of software testing

This paper describes the software testing and analysis tool, "ATAC (Automatic Test Analysis for C)", developed as a research instrument to measure the effectiveness of testing data. It is also a tool to facilitate the design and evaluation of test cases during software development. To demonstrate the capability and applicability of ATAC, the authors obtained 12 program versions of a critical industrial application developed in a recent university/industry N-version software project, and used ATAC to analyze and compare coverage of the testing on the program versions. Preliminary results from this investigation show that ATAC is a powerful testing tool to provide testing metrics and quality control guidance for the certification of high quality software components or systems.<
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