rUnit—A Framework for Test Analysis of C Programs

Asserting program correctness is a longstanding challenge in software development which consumes lots of resources and manpower. This is often accomplished through software testing at various levels. One such level is unit testing, where individual components behaviour is tested. In this paper we introduce the concept of test analysis, which instead of executing unit tests, analyses them to establish their outcome. This is line with previous approach towards using formal methods for program verification, however we introduce a middle layer called test analysis framework which allows for the introduction of new capabilities. We (briefly) formalize ordinary testing and test analysis to define the relation between the two. We introduce the notion of rich tests with a syntax and semantic instantiated for C. A prototype framework is implemented and extended to handle property-based stubbing and non-deterministic string variables. A few select examples are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the framework.