Risk-Based Object Oriented Testing

he critical path, mission critical, or safety critical sections. Severity assessment requires expert knowledge of the environment in which the software will be used as well as a thorough understanding of the costs of various failures. Musa addresses how to estimate the severity of software failures in the discussion of "Operational Profiles" in his book, Software Reliability Engineering. Both severity and probability of failure are needed before risk-based test planning can proceed. Severity assessment is not addressed here because it involves so much application-specific knowledge. Instead we confine the remainder of the discussion to the first part of the risk equation, ranking the likelihood of component failures, p(E i ), and a way to capture the information directly from the source code, independent of domain knowledge. The first task of risk-based testing is to determine how likely it is that each part of the software will fail. It has been proven that code that is more complex