Software testing - searching for the missing link

Software testing has been the subject of active research for approaching 30 years. In that time, there have been developments such as the invention of techniques and tools, the morphosis of these techniques and tools to deal with the adoption of new development paradigms and programming languages, a nd analytical and empirical comparisons of techniques to improve our unders tanding of their relative merits. Impressive though these developments are, there still remains the fundamental problem of trying to relate the result s of testing to some objective attribute of the program (such as number of faults). It is the search for this missing link that is attracting much of the recent research in the area. Any progress made towards this will have a considerable impact on our understanding of the subject and ultimately on software itself. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.