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，确保软件正在做我们想要它做的事情变得更加重要，没有错误。软件验证和确认(V&V)的目标是尽可能多地、尽可能快地发现错误，并收集尽可能多的信息来帮助我们消除这些错误。我们计划研究高效、有效的软件V&V方法。我们计划调查的主要方法是随机单元测试。*这是以随机顺序大量练习密切相关的程序文本小段的做法，允许V&V从业者对个别程序文本段进行“酷刑测试”。*我们已经开发了用于随机化单元测试的工具和技术，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，并将其提供给所有V&V从业者。我们还计划调查研究人员可以在实验中衡量软件测试技术有效性的方法。其中一个关键是自动生成程序的有故障的“变种”，并查看测试技术是否能捕捉到错误。捕获的错误的百分比是测试技术有效性的衡量标准。我们的工作集中在测量这些自动生成的变种与真实错误的行为到底有多接近。

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.