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On detecting faults for Boolean expressions

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Abstract

Fault based testing aims at detecting hypothesized faults based on specifications or program source. There are some fault based techniques for testing Boolean expressions which are commonly used to model conditions in specifications as well as logical decisions in program source. The MUMCUT strategy has been proposed to generate test cases from Boolean expressions. Moreover, it detects eight common types of hypothesized faults provided that the original expression is in irredundant disjunctive normal form, IDNF. Software practitioners are more likely to write the conditions and logical decisions in general form rather than IDNF. Hence, it is interesting to investigate the fault detecting capability of the MUMCUT strategy with respect to general form Boolean expressions. In this article, we perform empirical studies to investigate the fault detection capability of the MUMCUT strategy with respect to general form Boolean expressions as well as mutated expressions. A mutated expression can be obtained from the original given Boolean expression by making a syntactic change based on a particular type of fault.

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Notes

  1. The seven types of faults are expression negation fault, term omission fault, operator reference fault, literal negation fault, literal omission fault, literal insertion fault and literal reference fault. Please refer to Sect. 2.2 for a detailed discussion of these faults.

  2. Note that, variable negation fault is also used in other studies, say Kuhn (1999), to mean that all occurrences of a particular variable in the expression are negated. As such, VNF can be different from LNF when the variable being negated occurs more than once in the expression (Lau and Yu 2005).

  3. Note that, variable reference fault is also used in other studies, say Kuhn (1999), to mean that all occurrences of a particular variable in the expression are replaced by another variable. As such, VRF can be different from LRF when the variable being replaced occurs more than once in the expression (Lau and Yu 2005).

  4. Here, we assume that the \({\tt AND}\) operator will have a higher precedence than the \({\tt OR}\) operator.

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Acknowledgments

The work is supported in part from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project ID: DP0558597), the Swinburne University of Technology (Research Development Scheme 2006), and the Science and Technology of Beijing Jiaotong University (Grant No. 2007RC099).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia

    T. Y. Chen & M. F. Lau

  2. Swinburne University of Technology, Kuching, Malaysia

    K. Y. Sim

  3. Beijing JiaoTong University, Beijing, China

    C. A. Sun

Authors
  1. T. Y. Chen
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  2. M. F. Lau
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  3. K. Y. Sim
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  4. C. A. Sun
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Correspondence to M. F. Lau.

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Chen, T.Y., Lau, M.F., Sim, K.Y. et al. On detecting faults for Boolean expressions. Software Qual J 17, 245–261 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-008-9064-5

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