Efficient, effective methods of software verification and validation

随着软件在我们的日常生活中变得越来越重要，确保软件按照我们的要求去做，没有错误也变得越来越重要。软件验证和确认（V&V）的目标是尽可能快地发现尽可能多的错误，并收集尽可能多的信息，以帮助我们消除这些错误。我们计划研究软件V&V的高效方法。我们计划研究的主要方法是随机单元测试。这是一种实践，以随机的顺序对紧密相关的小块程序文本执行大量次，允许V&V从业者对单个程序文本执行“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领域软件中发现了错误。我们计划扩展这项工作，并使其适用于所有V&V从业人员。我们还计划调查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”的实践，并查看测试技术是否可以捕获错误。捕获的故障百分比是测试技术有效性的度量。我们的工作集中在精确测量这些自动生成的突变体模仿真实虫子的行为有多接近。

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.