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The Evolution and Testing of a Medium Sized Numerical Package

Barnes, David J. and Hopkins, Tim (2000) The Evolution and Testing of a Medium Sized Numerical Package. In: Langtangen, Hans Petter and Bruaset, Are Magnus and Quak, Ewald, eds. Advances in Software Tools for Scientific Computing. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering . Springer, Berlin, Germany, pp. 225-238. ISBN 978-3-540-66557-1. E-ISBN 978-3-642-57172-5. (doi:10.1007/978-3-642-57172-5_7) (KAR id:22068)

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of a medium sized software package, sc LAPACK, through its public releases over the last six years and establish a correlation, at a subprogram level, between a simply computable software metric value and the number of coding errors detected in the released routines. We also quantify the code changes made between issues of the package and attempt to categorize the reasons for these changes. We then consider the testing strategy used with sc LAPACK. Currently this consists of a large number of mainly self-checking driver programs along with sets of configuration files. These suites of test codes run a very large number of test cases and consume significant amounts of cpu time. We attempt to quantify how successful this testing strategy is from the viewpoint of the coverage of the executable statements within the routines being tested.

Item Type: Book section
DOI/Identification number: 10.1007/978-3-642-57172-5_7
Uncontrolled keywords: software metrics, lapack, software testing, statement coverage
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: David Barnes
Date Deposited: 27 Aug 2009 12:47 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/22068 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Barnes, David J..

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6073-0951
CReDIT Contributor Roles:

Hopkins, Tim.

Creator's ORCID:
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