Automated test data generation from Descartes specifications

Software testing has consistently been a large portion of the total software development cost for large scale software systems. In the last decade, a considerable part of investigation within the area of software engineering has dealt with software testing. In particular, much effort has been devoted to the area of automated testing. The Descartes formal executable specification language uses data structuring methods in a tree structure notation called a {open_quotes}Hoare Tree{close_quotes} to describe data. Hoare trees provide a simple notation for describing the input and output data of a specification. Given a Descartes specification, the test data can be generated from it. The generated test data must be reasonable in order to be practical. On the other hand, the test data must reveal as many errors as possible to verify the program. The developed test data generation method and tool achieve both goals.