Efficient, effective methods of software verification and validation

高效、有效的软件验证和确认方法

• 批准号: 203247-2006
• 负责人: Andrews, James
• 金额: $ 2.09万
• 依托单位: University of Western Ontario
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2006-01-01 至 2007-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=337830
• 关键词: Efficient; effective; methods; software; verification

As software becomes more important to our everyday lives, it becomes more important to make sure that that software is doing what we want it to do, without bugs.  The goal of software verification and validation (V&V) is to find as many bugs as we can, as fast as we can, and to collect as much information as we can that helps us to eliminate those bugs. We plan to investigate efficient, effective methods for software V&V.  The primary method we plan to investigate is randomized unit testing.  This is the practice of exercising small pieces of closely-associated program text a huge number of times in a random order, allowing V&V practitioners to perform "torture tests" on individual pieces of program text.  We have developed tools and techniques for randomized unit testing that have already found bugs in widely-available public-domain software.  We plan to extend this work and make it available to all V&V practitioners. We also plan to investigate ways in which researchers can experimentally measure the effectiveness of software test techniques.  Key among these is the practice of automatically generating faulty "mutants" of a program and seeing whether the test techniques can catch the faults.  The percentage of faults caught is a measure of the effectiveness of the test technique.  Our work concentrates on measuring exactly how closely these automatically-generated mutants mimic the behaviour of real bugs.

随着软件对我们的日常生活变得越来越重要，确保软件正在做我们想要它做的事情，没有错误变得更加重要。软件验证和确认（V&V）的目标是尽可能多地发现错误，尽可能快地收集尽可能多的信息，帮助我们消除这些错误。我们计划研究有效的软件V& V方法。我们计划研究的主要方法是随机单元测试。这是一种以随机顺序大量使用紧密关联的程序文本的做法，允许V&V从业者进行“酷刑测试”我们已经开发了用于随机单元测试的工具和技术，这些工具和技术已经在广泛可用的公共测试中发现了错误。我们计划扩展这项工作，并使其可用于所有V&V从业者。我们还计划研究研究人员可以通过实验测量软件测试技术有效性的方法。其中的关键是自动生成程序的错误“突变体”，并观察测试技术是否可以捕获错误。捕获错误的百分比是测试技术有效性的度量。我们的工作集中于测量这些自动生成的错误与测试技术的有效性之间的紧密程度。产生的突变体模仿真实的虫子的行为。