On a New Detecting Technique for Conjunctive Literal Insertion Fault in Boolean Expressions

Fault-based testing aims to generate test cases that can detect anticipated faults. A recent study has unified the definition of conjunctive literal insertion fault (LIF[.]) based on the abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of a Boolean expression. LIF[.] is considered harder to detect as compared with other faults in Boolean expressions. For irredundant disjunctive normal form (IDNF) Boolean expressions, Multiple Unique True Points (MUTP) strategy guarantees LIF[.] detection. For general form (GF) Boolean expressions, Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MCDC) was used and its fault detecting ability was reported as 70.9%. In this paper we propose a test case generation strategy to detect LIF[.]. Unlike the MUTP strategy, our strategy can be applied to general form Boolean expressions. Empirical results on two renowned software systems´ Boolean specifications indicate that, on average, the test suites satisfying our strategy detect approximately 99.0% of LIF[.] for GF expressions and 100.0% of LIF[.] for IDNF expressions. Moreover, the size of the required test suite is approximately half of the MCDC test suite.