Method to Determine a Basis Set of Paths to Perform Program Testing

摘要

A major problem in unit testing of programs is to determine which test cases touse. One technique that is in widespread use is to take the control flowgraph from each of the program functions and calculate a basis set of test paths. A basis set is a set of paths through the functions that are linearly independent and the paths in the basis set can be used to construct any path through the program flowgraph. Path construction is defined as adding or subtracting the number of times each edge is traversed. While this is not a total solution for test case generation, it does provide a good starting set of test cases. This paper gives an algorithm for taking a function's flowgraph and determining a basis set of paths. Proofs that the algorithm generates a set of paths that fulfill the above requirements are provided. A prototype tool, STest, is also discussed. Some general ideas for further improvement are also provided.