Development of an Automatic Testing Environment for Mercury

Abstract

Testing refers to the activity of running a software component with respect to a well-chosen set of inputs and comparing the outputs that are produced with the expected results in order to find errors. To make testing less repetitive and quicker, a so-called test automation framework can be used to automatically execute a (previously written) test suite without user intervention. An automatic tool runs the software component that is being tested once for each test input, compares the actual result with the expected result and reports those test cases that failed during the test; a well-known example of such a tool being JUnit for Java [1]. However, the construction of test suites remains a mostly manual and thus time-consuming activity [2]. The need of adequacy criteria [3,4] renders the construction of (large) test suites complex and error-prone [5]. The objective of this work is to develop an analysis that automatically creates a set of test inputs that satisfies a particular coverage criterion for a given program written in Mercury.