Validation through exclusion: techniques for ensuring software safety

Author

Cherniavsky, John C.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Georgetown Univ., Washington, DC, USA

fYear

1989

fDate

19-23 Jun 1989

Firstpage

56

Lastpage

59

Abstract

An approach to software safety is presented that emphasizes the construction of a test set for checking that conditions leading to software safety failures do not occur. The approach combines some mutation analysis along with some recent work on the fundamentals of testing. This approach tests over a very constrained space of functions where the test sets are determined by a type of software fault tree analysis. It is shown that test sets can be derived with the guarantee that if the system passes its tests, then it is correct (i.e., safe) or suffers from some safety flaw not reflected in the model

Keywords

program testing; program verification; safety; checking; correct; exclusion; guarantee; mutation analysis; software fault tree analysis; software safety failures; test set; testing; validation; Boolean functions; Computer science; Failure analysis; Fault trees; Genetic mutations; Logic design; Petri nets; Software safety; Software testing; System testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Assurance, 1989. COMPASS '89, 'Systems Integrity, Software Safety and Process Security', Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on

Conference_Location

Gaithersburg, MD

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CMPASS.1989.76039

Filename

76039