Graphical analysis of MC/DC using automated software testing

Testing has traditionally been one of the main techniques contributing to high software dependability and quality. Each stage in software development has a corresponding testing activity. Testing activity consumes about 50% of software development resources, so any technique aiming at reducing software-testing costs is likely to reduce software development costs. Proposed by NASA in 1994, the Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) criterion is a testing strategy required, among other practices, by the RTCA DO-178B. MC/DC is a white box testing criterion aiming at proving evidence that all clauses involved in a predicate can influence the predicate value in the required way. It subsumes other well-known coverage criteria such as statement and decision coverage. Our work involves a thorough study of the MC/DC criterion and our approach is organized in the following way. We automate the generation of number of test cases required to satisfy the MC/DC criterion. To this end we develop a generic algorithm that would for any given predicate, compute the minimum number of test cases that would cover the MC/DC criterion for this predicate.