Automated software testing with context-free grammars and covering arrays

计算机软件在现代世界中发挥着核心作用：在互联网和消费电子产品中，也在发电、提炼化学品和制造汽车的工厂中。软件漏洞是昂贵的，每年要花费数十亿美元来修复。软件测试是在软件发布使用之前发现错误的主要方式。 测试费用很高。测试软件产品的成本通常超过开发软件的成本。今天的大部分测试都是手动的；测试人员运行软件，模拟实际使用。由于现代软件的复杂性，需要进行许多测试。针对该软件的每个新版本重新运行测试。使用自动化测试，测试人员编写特殊的测试软件来执行测试。测试软件使用复杂的数学技术来生成大量的测试用例。测试软件的开发成本很高，但运行成本不高，从长远来看，这将使自动化测试变得更加高效。 拟议的研究将开发测试软件。我们将应用上下文无关文法和覆盖数组，这是由研究数学家开发的技术，用于软件测试。虽然我们的工作可以用于测试任何类型的软件，但我们将专注于几种特定的类型。扩展标记语言(XML)已经成为Web上的主要数据交换格式。它被如此广泛地使用，以至于XML应用程序中的错误可能会产生严重的后果。现代工厂和化工厂中的计算机是由专门的计算机控制的。事实证明，这些计算机很容易受到基于网络的网络攻击。这些计算机中的故障可能会产生极其严重的后果。最后，我们发现自动化测试技术可以用于为学生生成测试以及软件。我们将使用这些技术来开发网络应用程序，以测试学生的计算机编程知识。

Computer software plays a central role in the modern world: in the Internet and consumer electronics, but also in the plants which generate electrical power, refine chemicals and manufacture automobiles. Software bugs are expensive, costing billions per year to repair. Software testing is the primary way that bugs are discovered before software is released for use. Testing is expensive. Often the cost of testing a software product exceeds the cost of developing the software. Much of testing today is manual; testers run the software, imitating actual use. Because of the complexity of modern software, many tests are required. The tests are re-run against each new version of the software. With automated testing, testers write special test software to perform the tests. The test software uses sophisticated mathematical techniques to generate large numbers of test cases. The test software is expensive to develop but inexpensive to run, making automated testing much more efficient in the long run. The proposed research will develop test software. We will apply context-free grammars and covering arrays, techniques developed by research mathematicians, to software testing. While our work can be used to test any kind of software, we will focus on a few specific kinds. The extended markup language (XML) has become the dominant data exchange format on the web. It is so widely used that bugs in XML applications can have serious consequences. Computers in modern factories and chemical plants are controlled by specialized computers. It turns out that these computers are vulnerable to web-based network attacks. Failures in these computers can have extremely serious consequences. Finally, we have found that automated testing techniques can be used to generate tests for students as well as software. We will use these techniques to develop web applications which test students on their knowledge of computer programming.