Formal program testing
- 1 January 1981
- proceedings article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- p. 125-132
- https://doi.org/10.1145/567532.567546
Abstract
This paper proposes a practical alternative to program verification -- called formal program testing -- with similar, but less ambitious goals. Like a program verifier, a formal testing system takes a program annotated with formal specifications as input, generates the corresponding verification conditions, and passes them through a simplifier. After the simplification step, however, a formal testing system simply evaluates the verification conditions on a representative set of test data instead of trying to prove them. Formal testing provides strong evidence that a program is correct, but does not guarantee it. The strength of the evidence depends on the adequacy of the test data.This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: