CSSE 376 -- Software Quality Assurance -- Spring 2007

Homework 3:   Due: Monday, March 19

Purpose:  practice acceptance testing

1.      Prepare tests of  dates, a program that calculates the number of days difference between 2 dates. For this exercise you should consider dates to be a perfect program. That is, whatever behavior it exhibits should be assumed to be correct.

• Input to the program is a file of pairs of dates in the format: 

• NOTE: The last line must end with a newline (carriage return).
• NOTE: The year must be in the range 1900-9999 inclusive. That is, 1900 is a legal date, but 1899 is not.
• The program ignores the separators "/" and "," so you can use any other character.
• The program ignores all text after the second date. You may use that area for comments.
• Run the program from the command line: dates -i testfile
• To see other options type: dates -u

2.      Once you are familiar with the behavior of dates prepare enough tests so that all of its mutant versions can be detected. Each mutant is a version of the original program that has been modified to contain a bug. In other words, your job is to create enough tests so that any bug in dates would be detected. The mutant checker compares the results of running all your tests against the original program and each mutant. If a mutant produces a different response than the original program for any one of your tests then the mutant is killed.

• Run the mutant checker,  mdates, from the command line:  mdates -i testfile
• mdates accepts the same command line options as dates
• Your grade will be determined by the number of mutants you kill with your tests. If you kill 100% of the mutants, you will get a grade of 100. If you only kill 80% you will get a grade of 80, etc.

3.      Keep track of the time you spend on this assignment and include it in a comment on the first test line. For example: 

01/01/2000,01/01/2001  Spent 2.5 hours on this assignment

4.      Turn in the testfile to the ANGEL dropbox by midnight of the due date.