Pg. Frankl et Sn. Weiss, AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF BRANCH TESTING ANDDATA-FLOW TESTING, IEEE transactions on software engineering, 19(8), 1993, pp. 774-787
An experiment comparing the effectiveness of the all-uses and all-edge
s test data adequacy criteria was performed. The experiment was design
ed so as to overcome some of the deficiencies of previous software tes
ting experiments. A large number of test sets was randomly generated f
or each of nine subject programs with subtle errors. For each test set
, the percentages of executable edges and definition-use associations
covered were measured and it was determined whether the test set expos
ed an error. Hypothesis testing was used to investigate whether all-us
es adequate test sets are more likely to expose errors than are all-ed
ges adequate test sets. All-uses was significantly more effective than
all-edges for five of the subjects, and appeared guaranteed to detect
the error in four of them. Further analysis showed that in four of th
ese subjects, all-uses adequate test sets were more effective than all
-edges adequate test sets of similar size. Logistic regression analysi
s was used to investigate whether the probability that a test set expo
ses an error increases as the percentage of definition-use association
s or edges covered by it increases. The evidence did not strongly supp
ort this conjecture. Error exposing ability was shown to be strongly p
ositively correlated to percentage of covered definition-use associati
ons in only four of the nine subjects. Error exposing ability was also
shown to be positively correlated to the percentage of covered edges
in four (different) subjects, but the relationship was weaker.