SSP Group Meeting
Wednesday, April 7th, 11am-12pm
Division of Informatics, 80 South Bridge, Room F13

 

Oracles for Interpreting Test Results

Patricia Machado

Specification-based testing is concerned with deriving testing information from formal specifications of programs. Several works in this area have pointed out that testing can be successfully applied in the formal development of software. However, a great effort is still needed in order to have testing as a standard activity in formal frameworks. For instance, the accurate interpretation of testing results seems to be a crucial a point.

In this talk, we will discuss the oracle problem in the context of algebraic specifications expressed in first order logic. Oracles are decision procedures to interpret the results of a testing experiment. A proposed solution to the oracle problem will also be presented.

Here are the references I mentioned during the talk:

Gaudel et al. have done some work on testing Prolog programs as well. All concrete examples of their theory are given in Prolog. If you would like further references just let me know.

I have a paper where you can find more details (theorems, proofs, examples and so on) about my talk.

But, of course, for the lack of space, this paper does not present many details and assumes some previous knowledge of Algebraic Specifications. So, we also have a LFCS technical report with the same title where most of concepts and results are more carefully presented. Hopefully, this report will be online in the next couple of weeks.

The paper below just discusses a possible way of applying tests for verifying refinement steps. No concrete methods, just identifies some possible barriers.