Fault Evaluator: a tool for experimental investigation of effectiveness in software testing

Abstract—The specifications for many software systems, including safety-critical control systems, are often described using complex logical expressions. It is important to find effective methods to test implementations of such expressions. Analyzing the effectiveness of the testing of logical expressions manually is a tedious and error prone endeavor, thus requiring special software tools for this purpose. This paper presents Fault Evaluator, which is a new tool for experimental investigation of testing logical expressions in software. The goal of this tool is to evaluate logical expressions with various test sets that have been created according to a specific testing method and to estimate the effectiveness of the testing method for detecting specific faulty variations of the original expressions. The main functions of the tool are the generation of complete sets of faults in logical expressions for several specific types of faults; gaining expected (Oracle) values of logical expressions; testing faulty expressions and detecting whether a test set reveals a specific fault; and evaluating the effectiveness of a testing approach. Keywords- Software testing; effectiveness; logical expressions; tool I