Toward more effective testing for high assurance systems

The objective of the paper is to reduce the cost of testing software in high assurance systems. It is at present a very expensive activity and one for which there are no generally accepted guidelines. A part of the problem is that failure mechanisms for software are not as readily understood as those for hardware, and that the experience of any one project does not provide enough data to improve the understanding. A more comprehensive attack on the high cost of software test requires pooling of fault and failure data from many projects, and an initiative by NIST that can furnish the basis for the data collection and analysis is described.