An integrated system for program testing using weak mutation and data flow analysis

Abstract

The idea of weak mutation testing is to construct test data which would force program components such as expressions and variable references to produce a wrong 'result' if they were to contain certain types of error, for example, off-by-a-constant or wrong-variable. The idea of data flow driven testing is to construct test data which forces the execution of different interactions between variable definitions and references in a program.This paper describes a tool for FORTRAN 77 programs which has been developed to help a user apply the weak mutation and data flow testing techniques. The tool instruments a given source program and collects a program execution history. It is then able to report on the completeness of the test data with respect to weak mutation and a family of data flow path selection criteria. Some preliminary experiments with use of the tool are described.