Quality by means of automated testing

The IEI's Software Quality group participates to a nation-wide research project on enterprises for Software Engineering. Our task is to investigate into methods and tools for the Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) of software and our long-term goal is the design of a Software Engineering laboratory. While V&V is a fundamental component of every software development process, IV&V is the activity on which software approval and certification is based. IV&V imports methods, technologies and tools from V&V discipline, but some specific problems arise. After briefly settling the scope of IV&V, in this paper we shall deal with the subject of independent testing, i.e. testing a program by a team which does not cooperate directly to product development nor has straightforward access to documentation and resources. Generally speaking, software testing is performed at different levels, from unit testing up to acceptance testing, and different kind of information is required at each level. In our opinion, at any level the key issue in independent testing is to automate how much it is possible to automate. In this view, we have furnished our "laboratory" with a test suite supporting regression testing and coverage testing. At the same time, research in the static analysis of program structure for the purposes of pathwise testing has been carried out and a suitable algorithm which finds a test path set satisfying the branch testing criterion has been conceived. The static analysis phase has been automated within a prototype tool called BAT, currently undergoing experimental evaluation.