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Toward a theory of test data selection
Abstract
This paper examines the theoretical and practical role of testing in software development. We prove a fundamental theorem showing that properly structured tests are capable of demonstrating the absence of errors in a program. The theorem's proof hinges on our definition of test reliability and validity, but its practical utility hinges on being able to show when a test is actually reliable. We explain what makes tests unreliable (for example, we show by example why testing all program statements, predicates, or paths is not usually sufficient to insure test reliability), and we outline a possible approach to developing reliable tests. We also show how the analysis required to define reliable tests can help in checking a program's design and specifications as well as in preventing and detecting implementation errors.
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Citations
Cited by
Hints on Test Data Selection: Help for the Practicing Programmer
DeMillo, R. A., Lipton, R. J., & Sayward, F. G. (1978) · Computer · doi:10.1109/c-m.1978.218136 · Cited by 2,081
Software unit test coverage and adequacy
Zhu, H., Hall, P. A. V., & May, J. H. R. (1997) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/267580.267590 · Cited by 1,247
Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution
Lehman, M. M. (1980) · Proceedings of the IEEE · doi:10.1109/proc.1980.11805 · Cited by 1,181
Korat: automated testing based on Java predicates
Boyapati, C., Khurshid, S., & Marinov, D. (2002) · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · doi:10.1145/566171.566191 · Cited by 593
Weak Mutation Testing and Completeness of Test Sets
Howden, W. E. (1982) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.1982.235571 · Cited by 477
Metadata
- Authors
- Goodenough, J. B., & Gerhart, S. L.
- Venue
- ACM SIGPLAN Notices
- Published
- 1975-04
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 493-510
- ISSN
- 0362-1340 (ISSN-L)
- 1558-1160
- OpenAlex
- W2132840411
- Cited by
- 514
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 32.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Toward a theory of test data selection. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/390016.808473
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- Goodenough, J. B., & Gerhart, S. L. (1975). Toward a theory of test data selection. ACM SIGPLAN Notices. https://doi.org/10.1145/390016.808473
Data sources
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.
