A Study of Applying Extended PIE Technique to Software Testability Analysis

During the software development process, data that has been gained from the testing phase can help developers to predict software reliability more precisely. But the testing stage usually takes more and more effort due to the growing complexity of software. How to build software that can be tested efficiently has become an important topic in addition to enhancing and developing new testing methods. Thus, research on software testability has been developed variously. In the past, a dynamic technique for estimating program testability was proposed and called propagation, infection, and execution (PIE) analysis. Previous research studies show that PIE analysis can complement software testing. However, this technique requires a lot of computational overhead in estimating the testability of software components. In this paper, we propose an Extended PIE (EPIE) technique to accelerate the traditional PIE analysis, based on generating group testability as a substitute for location testability. This technique can be separated into three steps: breaking a program into blocks, dividing blocks into groups, and marking target statements. We developed a tool called ePAT (extended PIE Analysis Tool) to help us identify the locations which will be analyzed. The experimental results show that the number of analyzed locations can be effectively decreased and that the estimated value of testability remains acceptable and useful.