Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Veritesting Tackles Path-Explosion Problem
To view the accompanying paper, visit http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202649
Imagine you are working on a large piece of software for a safety-critical system, such as the braking system of a car. How would you make sure the car will not accelerate under any circumstance when the driver applies the brake? How would you know that someone other than the driver would not be able to stop a moving car by exploiting a remote security vulnerability in the software system? How would you confirm the braking system will not fail suddenly due to a fatal crash in the software system?
Testing is the only predominant technique used by the software industry to answer such questions and to make software systems reliable. Studies show that testing accounts for more than half of the total software development cost in industry. Although testing is a widely used and a well-established technique for building reliable software, existing techniques for testing are mostly ad hoc and ineffective—serious bugs are often exposed post-deployment. Wouldn't it be nice if one could build a software system that could exhaustively test any software and report all critical bugs in the software to its developer?
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