Automated generation of testcase datasets

Software quality enhancement can be achieved in the near term through use of a systematic program testing methodology. The methodology attempts to relate functional software testcases with formal software specifications as a means to achieve correspondence between the software and its specifications. To do this requires generation of appropriate testcase data.Automatic testcase generation is based on a priori knowledge of two forms of internal structure information: a representation of the tree of subschema automatically identified from within each program text, and a representation of the iteration structure of each subschema. This partition of a large program allows for efficient and effective automatic testcase generation using straightforward backtracking techniques.During backtracking a number of simplifying, consolidating, and consistency analyses are applied. The result is either (1) early recognition of the impossibility of a particular program flow, or (2) efficient generation of input variable specifications which cause the testcase to traverse each portion of the required program flow.A number of machine output examples of the backtracking facility are given, and the general effectiveness of the entire process is discussed.