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Cited by 400

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Reliability of the Path Analysis Testing Strategy

Howden, W.E.·1976·IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
DOI 10.1109/tse.1976.233816
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Abstract

A set of test data T for a program P is reliable if it reveals that P contains an error whenever P is incorrect. If a set of tests T is reliable and P produces the correct output for each element of T then P is a correct program. Test data generation strategies are procedures for generating sets of test data. A testing strategy is reliable for a program P if it produces a reliable set of test data for P. It is proved that an effective testing strategy which is reliable for all programs cannot be constructed. A description of the path analysis testing strategy is presented. In the path analysis strategy data are generated which cause different paths in a program to be executed. A method for analyzing the reliability of path testing is introduced. The method is used to characterize certain classes of programs and program errors for which the path analysis strategy is reliable. Examples of published incorrect programs are included.

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Metadata

Authors
Howden, W. E.
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Published
1976-09
Volume
SE-2
Issue
3
Pages
208-215
ISSN
0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1109/tse.1976.233816
OpenAlex
W2006159725
Cited by
400
References
0
FWCI
23.37
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Reliability of the Path Analysis Testing Strategy. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/tse.1976.233816
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Howden, W. E. (1976). Reliability of the Path Analysis Testing Strategy. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.1976.233816

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.