Constructing an automated testing oracle: an effort to produce reliable software

Abstract

Achieving reliability in practice is becoming a dominant issue in software engineering. This paper describes part of a systematic approach to producing reliable software that is based on automated support for software testing. Our approach constructs an automated testing oracle based on software specifications written in the Z specification language. The contextual part of the specification describes the set of legal inputs to the program and the semantics part describes the meaning of the given input data. The potential roles of this approach in improving software reliability are discussed and some future opportunities are indicated.