Automated software testing and analysis: techniques, pratices and tools

As computer systems are permeating our society in daily life and are performing an increasing number of critical tasks, research in software testing and analysis has become of paramount importance. Although we are currently not able to prove program correctness for real-world applications, rigorous software development processes in combination with testing provides us with confidence in the quality of software. Software testing and analysis, however, is a very involved task. As the size and complexity of software continue to grow, manual testing becomes very tedious. Automation of software testing and tool support for testing, therefore, have been emerging as a key technology to quality assurance of today's software industry. As research in software testing and analysis has become increasingly active, there is also a growing trend towards combining formal methods and informal techniques for program verification.