Inductive inference and software testing

Abstract

Abstract The term ‘inductive inference’ denotes the process of hypothesizing a general rule from examples. It can be considered as the inverse process of program testing, which is a process of sampling the behaviour of a program and gathering confidence in the quality of the software from the samples. As one of the fundamental and ubiquitous components of intelligent behaviour, much effort has been spent on both the theory and practice of inductive inference as a branch of artificial intelligence. In this paper, software testing and inductive inference are reviewed to illustrate how the rich and solid theory of inductive inference can be used to study the foundations of software testing.