An Empirical Evaluation and Analysis of the Fault-Detection Capability of MUMCUT for General Boolean Expressions

Proceedings of the International Computer Symposium (ICS '04),
Taipei, Taiwan, pp. 926-932 (2004)

An Empirical Evaluation and Analysis of the Fault-Detection
Capability of MUMCUT for General Boolean Expressions ¹

C.-A. Sun, ², K.Y. Sim, ³, T.H. Tse ⁴, and T.Y. Chen ²

[paper from ICS 2004 | [postprint]

ABSTRACT

Boolean expressions are extensively used in software specifications. It is important to generate a small-sized test set for Boolean expressions without sacrificing the fault-detection capability. MUMCUT is an efficient test case generation strategy for Boolean expressions in Irreducible Disjointed Normal Form (IDNF). In the real world, however, Boolean expressions written by a software designer or programmer are not normally in IDNF. In this paper, we apply MUMCUT to generate test cases for general Boolean expressions and develop a mutation-based empirical evaluation on the effectiveness of this application. The experimental data show that MUMCUT can still detect single seeded faults in up to 98.20% of general Boolean expressions. We also analyze patterns where test cases generated by MUMCUT cannot detect the seeded faults.
Keywords: Test Case Generation, Boolean Specifications, Software Testing

1. This research is supported in part by an ARC Discovery Grant (project no. DP 0345147) and a grant of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project no. 108300).

2. Centre for Software Analysis and Testing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn 3122, Australia

3. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, 93576 Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

4. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
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