Error-oriented architecture testing*

Architecture validation is becoming more and more important as diverging cost/performance criteria and competition cause the number of models within a computer family to proliferate. Some popular architectures are now being manufactured by many different companies and the chances of a company inexperienced with the architecture making mistakes is very high. Not only will errors in an implementation cause software incompatibility, the costs of fixing them are usually prohibitively high once there are a large number of defective machines in the field. Excellent evidence demonstrating the inadequacies of present testing techniques is implementation errors discovered in the field for many major computer families. This study was initiated in the hope that an error-oriented approach to architecture testing may provide a better detection of implementation errors.