Summary: Adding Value to Formal Test Oracles
James H. Andrews, Rui Fu and Vicky D. Liu
University of Western Ontario
Department of Computer Science
London, Ontario, CANADA N6A 5B7
andrews@csd.uwo.ca
Abstract
Test oracles are programs which check the output of test
cases run on other programs. We describe techniques which
add value to formally­defined test oracles in three ways: (a)
by measuring functional coverage of test suites, (b) by giv­
ing automated support to the process of validating the or­
acles, and (c) by automating the generation of test cases
from the oracles. The techniques involve the use of cover­
age measures and AI­based search algorithms. We describe
the application of these techniques in the verification and
validation of a complex piece of real­world software.
1. Introduction
In previous research [1, 2], we have studied the formal
definition of test oracles [10], which are programs that eval­

Source: Andrews, Jamie - Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences