Testability, fault size and the domain-to-range ratio: An eternal triangle

A number of different concepts have been proposed that, loosely speaking, revolve around the notion of software testability. Indeed, the concept of testability itself has been interpreted in a variety of ways by the software community. One interpretation is concerned with the extent of the modifications a program component requires, in terms of its input and output variables, so that the entire behaviour of the component is observable and controllable. Another interpretation is the ease with which faults, if present in a program, can be revealed by the testing process and the propagation, infection and execution (PIE) model has been proposed as a method of estimating this. It has been suggested that this particular interpretation of testability might be linked with the metric domain-to-range ratio (DRR), i.e. the ratio of the cardinality of the set of all inputs (the domain) to the cardinality of the set of all outputs (the range). This paper reports work in progress exploring some of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Martin R. Woodward, Zuhoor A. Al-Khanjari
• Keywords: Domain-to-range Ratio, ISSTA 2000, Software Engineering, Software Testability, Testability