Arcadia Papers: ABSTRACT
"Specification-based Test Oracles for Reactive Systems",
by Debra J. Richardson, Stephanie Lief Aha and T. Owen O'Malley in
Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on
Software Engineering,
pages 105-118, Melbourne, Australia, May 1992.
Abstract
The testing process is typically systematic in test data selection and
test execution. For the most part, however, the effective use of
test oracles has been neglected, even though they are a critical
component of the testing process. Test oracles prescribe acceptable
behavior for test execution. In the absence of judging test results
with oracles, testing does not achieve its goal of revealing failures
or assuring correct behavior in a practical manner; manual result checking is
neither reliable nor cost-effective. We argue that test oracles should be
derived from specifications and in conjunction with testing criteria,
represented in a common form, and their use made integral to the testing
process. For complex, reactive systems, oracles must reflect the
multiparadigm nature of the required behavior. Such systems are often
specified using multiple languages, each selected for its utility in
specifying a particular computational paradigm. Thus, we are developing
an approach for deriving and using oracles based on multiparadigm and
multilingual specifications to enable the verification of test results
for reactive systems as well as less complex systems.
The Arcadia Project
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Last modified: Fri Nov 11 14:42:12 1994