Improving MCDC adequate test sets for safety critical software to be RORG adequate

Abstract: A number of logical code coverage criteria have been used throughout the years in the testing of safety-critical software. Kaminski, et al. proposed Relational Operator Replacement Global (RORG), a method to bring benefits from ROR mutation to Modified Condition / Decision Coverage (MCDC), which is widely used in the avionics industry. However, there is a lack of studies in the industry to support this method. In this thesis, we report on the results of applying RORG to avionic code, augmenting an MCDC adequate test set to satisfy RORG, evaluating its ability to find real faults in industrial software. Conclusions drawn from this thesis are: (1) Faults in relational operators in avionic code are rare, no faults were found in this study. (2) 24% of the relational operators in our study would require additional software requirements to be verified for RORG coverage. (3) 37% of the relational operators in our study were infeasible to test due to program semantics. (4) 84% of the tests added covered enumeration comparisons.