Random testing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:42, 7 July 2015

Revision as of 10:32, 29 August 2015

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<blockquote>Random testing has only a specialized niche in practice, mostly because an effective oracle is seldom available, but also because of difficulties with the operational profile and with generation of pseudorandom input values.<ref name="Hamlet94"/></blockquote>

An Oracleoracle is an instrument for verifying whether the outcomes match the program specification or not. An operation profile is knowledge about usage patterns of the program and thus which parts are more important.

For programming languages and platforms which have contracts (for example Eiffel. .NET or various extensions of Java like JML, CoFoJa...) contracts act as natural oracles and the approach has been applied successfully.<ref name="AutoTest">http://se.inf.ethz.ch/research/autotest/</ref> In particular, random testing finds more bugs than manual inspections or user reports (albeit different ones).<ref name="ManualvsRandom">{{cite journal|title=On the number and nature of faults found by random testing|year=2009|publisher=John Wiley and Sons|url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/stvr.415/abstract|author=Ilinca Ciupa|author2=Alexander Pretschner|author3=Manuel Oriol|author4=Andreas Leitner|author5=Bertrand Meyer|journal=Software Testing, Verification and Reliability|doi=10.1002/stvr.415|volume=21|pages=3–28}}</ref>