Annotating Control-Flow Graphs for Formalized Test Coverage Criteria
Control flow coverage criteria are an important part of the process of qualifying embedded software for safety-critical systems. Criteria such as modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) as defined by DO-178B are used by regulators to judge the adequacy of testing and by QA engineers to design tests when full path coverage is impossible.
Despite their importance, these coverage criteria are often misunderstood. One problem is that their definitions are typically written in natural language specification documents, making them imprecise. Other works have proposed formal definitions using binary predicate logic, but these definitions are difficult to apply to the analysis of real programs. Control-Flow Graphs (CFGs) are the most common model for analyzing program logic in compilers, and seem to be a good fit for defining and analyzing coverage criteria. However, CFGs discard the explicit concept of a decision, making their use for this task seem impossible.
In this paper, we show how to annotate a CFG with decision information inferred from the graph itself. We call this annotated model a Control-Flow Decision Graph (CFDG) and we use it to formally define several common coverage criteria. We have implemented our algorithms in a tool which we show can be applied to automatically annotate CFGs output from popular compilers.
Mon 27 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | |||
11:00 30mDay opening | Welcome to 20 Years of A-MOST A-MOST Florian Lorber Silicon Austria Labs, Cristina Seceleanu Mälardalen University, Martin Tappler TU Wien, Austria | ||
11:30 30mFull-paper | Testing the Evolution of Feature Models with Specific Combinatorial Tests A-MOST Andrea Bombarda University of Bergamo, Silvia Bonfanti University of Bergamo, Angelo Gargantini University of Bergamo File Attached | ||
12:00 30mFull-paper | Annotating Control-Flow Graphs for Formalized Test Coverage Criteria A-MOST Sean Kauffman Queen's University, Canada, Carlos Moreno , Sebastian Fischmeister University of Waterloo, Canada |