Toward an integration of data flow and domain testing

Abstract Data flow and domain testing are both well-known program-based testing techniques. Each has its intuitive appeal, but their widespread use has been hampered by practical limitations. Data flow testing provides a number of structural coverage criteria, which are of low cost but are not well-suited for finding faults involving special values or small shifts in domain boundaries. Domain testing is designed to uncover boundary shift faults of a given path domain, but it lacks a path selection criterion to guide the selection of testing paths from a program. By letting a variable definition be “domain tested”, this paper presents an integrated approach that keeps the strengths of the two testing strategies while avoiding their deficiencies.

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