Software unit test coverage and adequacy

Abstract

Objective measurement of test quality is one of the key issues in software testing. It has been a major research focus for the last two decades. Many test criteria have been proposed and studied for this purpose. Various kinds of rationales have been presented in support of one criterion or another. We survey the research work in this area. The notion of adequacy criteria is examined together with its role in software dynamic testing. A review of criteria classification is followed by a summary of the methods for comparison and assessment of criteria.