Software diagnosability

This paper is concerned with diagnosability, its definition and the axiomatization of its expected behaviour. The intuitive expected behaviour of diagnosability is defined relative to basic operations that are applicable on software designs. A diagnosability measurement is proposed which is consistent with the stated axioms. The diagnosability metric is based on an analysis of the design structure: fault location effort and precision are measured for a given testing context. Compromises between global test difficulty and diagnostic precision are illustrated on part of a data-flow software design. Throughout the paper, we develop a case study