Performance testing of function subroutines

Abstract

The certification of numerical subroutines for an automatic computer is generally a difficult job. In one sense, certification of a subroutine is an in-depth review of its documentation to determine how well the documentation describes the performance and programming of the subroutine. It involves, among other things, performance testing of the program being certified. of necessity, the details of the performance testing vary from one type of subroutine to another. Indeed, in most cases it is difficult to define a concrete measure of performance for a particular type of routine. For subroutines for computing functions, however, measures of performance are rather easy to define and much effort has gone into certifications in the past few years.