Fault Detection in Testing-A Survey Approach

Software testing is an important but expensive process because about fifty percent of the total development cost is spent for it. However, this part is the first one to miss by software developers if there is a limited time to complete the project. Tests are commonly generated from program source code, graphical models of software (such as control flow graphs), and specifications/requirements. Creating test cases manually is a huge work for software developers. It is time consuming and error prone. A solution which automatically generates test cases and test data can help the software developers to create test cases from software designs/models in early stage of the software development (before coding). High quality software cannot be done without high quality testing. Heuristic techniques can be applied for creating quality test data. A fault is defined as a textual problem with the code resulting from a mental mistake by the programmer or designer. A fault is also called a defect. Fault-based testing refers to the collection of information on whether classes of software faults (or defects) exist in a program. Since testing can only prove the existence of errors and not their absence, this testing approach is a very sound one. In this paper we describe the methods for evaluating the fault, methods for characterizing faults.