A Tale of Two Paradigms: Formal methods and software testing

There are two camps of software developers: formal methods advocates battling against traditionalist supporters of software testing and assessment metrics. Surely, as Turing observed, we will (must) never do away with testing in some form. But clearly, formal methods cannot be ignored, and must be the basis of quality assurance in some form. Important impacts of specifications on testing are in test selection, test oracles, and analysis of test suites and theoretical results of testing. We examine uses of formal specifications in software testing, particularly, roles of Z specifications in software testing. We also present our unifying framework for specification-based testing, which is founded on Z