GLA Summit 2020/Rigorous Testing Automated: Push-Button Approaches
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| Conference | GLA Summit 2020 |
| Presenters | Péter Bokor |
Rigorous Testing Automated: Push-Button Approaches by Péter Bokor
What is the best you can get from unit testing? Push-button, full automation, test coverage. Are we that far with LabVIEW? Not quite. We have tools for generating test templates, for measuring coverage, for executing tests automatically. That's not bad. But can we push automation further by generating smart tests? Yes, it is possible, even without AI! There are deterministic techniques to generate test inputs that can thoroughly exercise the VI under test reaching even full test coverage. Test coverage is important for various applications, especially for safety-critical systems, as it can guarantee code reachability (no dead code) and it's a proof that the covered part of the code is tested. In this talk we'll talk about possible future directions of the automation of unit testing and code analysis of LabVIEW code. Specifically, we'll address two techniques, symbolic execution and feedback-based mutation testing, that can contribute to better LabVIEW code. These techniques vary in terms of precision (efficiency) and implementation complexity, which turn out to be a trade-off, and we’ll also see which one of the two techniques is in reach today for LabVIEW. The presenter is on the team who develops the InstaCoverage tool for LabVIEW.