Can you certify your software to MC/DC? A static analysis approach to account for the number test cases

• Alexandre L. Martins USP
• Ana C. V. de Melo USP

Abstract

Software testing is an important task in systems development to certify the quality of the final product. If it is not properly applied, we can end up with low-quality systems. On the other hand, applying rigorous software testing techniques can spend nearly 40-50% of the system development cost. The issue is: how to provide a good software quality, by means of testing techniques, and keep the overall system cost under control?This paper presents a study on the cost of applying the Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) (proposed by NASA1 and used by FAA2 [19]) to software by accounting for the number of test cases that need to be generated. In order to achieve our goal, we collected the MC/DC coverage requirements in a set of open source software to estimate the cost of this criterion application in terms of the number of test cases.

Keywords: MC/DC, coverage, quality, software, testing