Analysis of Efficiency of Automated Software Testing Methods: Direction of Research

Efficiency is an important property of software testing potentially even more important than effectiveness. Because complex software errors exist even in critical, widely distributed programs for many years, developers are looking for automated techniques to gain confidence in their programs correctness. The most effective way to inspire confidence in the programs correctness for all inputs is called program verification. However, due to state explosion and other problems, the applicability of verification remains limited to programs of a few hundred lines of code. Now, software testing trades this effectiveness for efficiency. It allows one to gain confidence in the programs correctness with every test input that is executed. So, automated testing is an efficient way to inspire confidence in the programs correctness for an increasing set of inputs. Yet, most research of software testing has mainly focused on effectiveness.