Gast: Generic Automated Software Testing

Software testing is a labor-intensive and hence expensive, yet heavily used technique to control quality. In this paper we introduce Gast, a fully automatic test-tool. Properties from first order logic can be expressed in the system, Gast automatically generates appropriate test-data, evaluates the property for these values, and analyzes the test-results. In this way it becomes easier and cheaper to test software components. The distinguishing property of our system is that the test-data are generated in a systematic and generic way using generic programming techniques. This implies that there is no need for the user to indicate how data should be generated. Moreover, duplicated tests are avoided and for finite domains Gast is able to proof a property by testing it for all possible values. As an important side-effect, it also encourages stating formal properties of the software.