A Generic Fault Model for Quality Assurance

Because they are comparatively easy to implement, structural coverage criteria are commonly used for test derivation in modeland code-based testing. However, there is a lack of compelling evidence that they are useful for finding faults, specifically so when compared to random testing. This paper challenges the idea of using coverage criteria for test selection and instead proposes an approach based on fault models. We define a general fault model as a transformation from correct to incorrect programs and/or a partition of the input data space. Thereby, we leverage the idea of fault injection for test assessment to test derivation. We instantiate the developed general fault model to describe existing fault models. We also show by example how to derive test cases.