A Method of Program Domain Automated Determination Based on Data Flow Analysis

The determination of program's input domain is helpful to select test data. The implementation of a program defines the domain of input variables, though the specification of the program also specifies the domain. However, if they are not coincided with each other exactly, some software faults can be detected. Using the techniques of data flow analysis and relevance analysis on given program the domain can automatically be identified. The program slicing method is employed to delete those statements and functions that are not related to input variables, so that the given program is simplified and analyzing efficiency is improved. The domain of input variables can be obtained under some particular circumstances by using dynamic simulation strategy. A lot of experimental results show that the proposed approach is efficient.