Information Theory, Information View, and Software Testing

Information theory was founded by Claude Shannon in 1948 for communication and has also been applied in many other areas since then. With the basic concepts from information theory, this paper studies software testing from a new view, called information view. From information view, the purpose of software testing is to generate information for the software under test to reduce its uncertainty, and the product from the testing is information. As demonstrated in several simple examples, equations used in information theory can help to calculate the information quantity generated from a test case, and use it as a measurement to improve testing processes. From information view, this paper also raises several new fundamental questions, which cannot be answered by either Shannon´s information theory or current software testing theory, for future research to get a better understanding of the nature of software testing.