Empirical Studies on the Path Coverage of Classification-tree Based Test Suites

In recent years, many systematic specification-based software testing methods have been developed and successfully applied to practical software system development. These methods provide stepwise guidelines to derive a comprehensive test suite that targets at the verification of the functionalities delivered by the software. However, such a test suite does not take into account of the internal logic of the software implementation. This project plans to explore to what extent a comprehensive specification-based test suite can exercise the internal logic of typical software implementations. Specifically, the project seeks to empirically identify the types of logical paths of a software implementation that are commonly exercised or typically ignored by test suites derived by using the classification-tree method. The empirical results of this exploratory study are expected to provide specific hints to future research directions towards the improvement of the quality and effectiveness of specification-based test suites.