A Formal Interpretation of Software Testing as Inductive Inference

Software testing can be viewed as an inductive inference process during which the tester attempts to deduce software properties from its behaviour on a finite number of test cases. This paper investigates the foundation of software testing by interpreting the axioms of test adequacy criteria as properties of inductive inference. The interpretation manifests the conservative and simplest hypothesis nature of the induction underlying software testing. It also yields results relating adequate testing to software correctness and reliability. The convergence of the inductive inference process is proved to be a condition of the correctness of tested software. By measuring the convergence according to the probability of an inference result being correct up to a given error rate, a new approach to software reliability estimation is proposed, which differs from existing ones in taking software complexity into account.