An Empirical Evaluation of Three Defect-Detection Techniques

We replicated a controlled experiment first run in the early 1980's to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of 50 student subjects who used three defect-detection techniques to observe failures and isolate faults in small C programs. The three techniques were code reading by stepwise abstraction, functional (black-box) testing, and structural (white-box) testing. Two internal replications showed that our relatively inexperienced subjects were similarly effective at observing failures and isolating faults with all three techniques. However, our subjects were most efficient at both tasks when they used functional testing. Some significant differences among the techniques in their effectiveness at isolating faults of different types were seen. These results suggest that inexperienced subjects can apply a formal verification technique (code reading) as effectively as an execution-based validation technique, but they are most efficient when using functional testing.