An analytical approach to software testing

This paper describes a quantitative software testing methodology for nonstructured and structured programs. The paper first treats some of the recent work by McCabe [3] and Paige [4,5] which has developed the groundwork for a quantitative analysis on software testing. This perspective has set the stage for use of a program-graph basis as the thread for the software testing effort. A basis is a set of paths such that any other path in the graph can be expressed as a com bination of paths in the basis. A technique for generating a unique, practical basis for a program-graph is introduced. The strategy for testing programs using this basis is discussed. The final section treats the simplifying effect of structured programs on this testing approach.