We have implemented an experimental test development environment (TDE) intended to raise the effectiveness of tests produced for GUI systems, and raise the productivity of the GUI system tester.The environment links a test designer, a test design library, and a test generation engine with a standard commercial capture/replay tool. These components provide a human tester the capabilities to capture sequences of interactions with the system under test (SUT), to visually manipulate and modify the sequences, and to create test designs that represent multiple individual test sequences. Test development is done using a high-level model of the SUT's GUI, and graphical representations of test designs. TDE performs certain test maintenance tasks automatically, permitting previously written test scripts to run on a revised version of the SUT.

This paper presents a family of strategies for automatically generating test data for any implementation intended to satisfy a given specification that is a Boolean formula. The fault detection effectiveness of these strategies is investigated both analytically and empirically, and the costs, assessed in terms of test set size, are compared.>

This paper introduces dynamic impact analysis as a cost-effective technique to enforce the error-propagation condition for detecting a fault. The intuition behind dynamic impact analysis is as follows. In a specific test-case, if an execution of a syntactic component has a strong impact on the program output and if the output is correct, then the value of that component-execution is not likely to be erroneous. To capture this intuition in a theoretical framework the notion of impact is formally defined and the concept of impact strength is proposed as a quantitative measure of the impact. In order to provide an infrastructure supporting the computation of impact strengths, program impact graphs and execution impact graphs are introduced. An empirical study validating the computation of impact strengths is presented. It is shown that the impact strengths computed by dynamic impact analysis provide reasonable estimates for the error-sensitivity with respect to the output except when the impact is via one or more error-tolerant components of the program. Potential applications of dynamic impact analysis in the area of mutation testing and dynamic program slicing are discussed.