Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Although programming languages are widely used for writing automated software test code, we argue that this is a harmful practice for software quality assurance. Programming languages are designed to implement complex algorithms and do not provide a natural mechanism for describing software tests. Software tests consist of sequences of test actions - such as, inputting test input data, checking test outcomes, and recording test results - and not only executing the application-under-test. We dissect a sample software test written in C++ and identify several harmful effects of writing software tests in programming languages.

We believe that the problems we identify are overcome by using a language specifically designed for describing software tests. We briefly describe TestTalk, a test description language under development, and provide a sample software test written in TestTalk.