Data flow-based test adequacy analysis for languages with pointers

Abstract

The data flow adequacy criteria, originally proposed for a simple language and Pascal, have been substantially modified to provide more thorough analysis for code with extensive use of pointers and complex control structures, such as code frequently written in the C language. A prototype tool, TACTIC, has been built to extract def-use associations from C programs, and to determine whether test sets are adequate with respect to the new criteria. TACTIC successfully analyzes dataflow of individual functions in C programs with single-level pointer references.