An approach to the automatic derivation of path domains

Structural analysis and testing are fundamental activities in the achievement of software quality, which account for at least half of the development effort. Thus, automation of the testing process can result in higher quality at lower costs. In this paper, the problem of automatically deriving an input subdomain which causes the execution of a selected path is considered. A dynamic approach, based on actual program execution, as opposed to the more traditionally used symbolic evaluation, is proposed. First, a rigorous framework is settled, within which the procedure followed is described. The approach is currently defined to deal with numerical input variables and piecewise linear predicates. Ongoing experimentation will confirm both the effectiveness and the extendibility of the approach.