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A major drawback of most program testing methods is that they ignore program specifications, and instead base their analysis solely on the information provided in the implementation. This paper describes the partition analysis method, which assists in program testing and verification by evaluating information from both a specification and an implementation. This method employs symbolic evaluation techniques to partition the set of input data into procedure subdomains so that the elements of each subdomain are treated uniformly by the specification and processed uniformly by the implementation. The partition divides the procedure domain into more manageable units. Information related to each subdomain is used to guide in the selection of test data and to verify consistency between the specification and the implementation. Moreover, the test data selection process, called partition analysis testing, and the verification process, called partition analysis verification, are used to enhance each other, and thus increase program reliability.
Richardson et al. (Mon,) studied this question.