Ramayan Singh

An evaluation of Boolean expression testing techniques

Increase in the size and complexity of the software developed has made software testing a challenging exercise. A number of testing techniques are available but they differ in terms of statement coverage, condition coverage and particularly in fault detection capabilities. The size of the test suite also differs from one technique to other. Fault that has propagated into the system inadvertently, especially into the branch statements, have severe effects as they affect the logic of the program. In this paper, an experimental evaluation of the popular branch-testing techniques (Elmendorfs method, Boolean Operator (BOR), Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MCDC), and Reinforced Criteria/Decision Coverage (RCDC)) is presented. These techniques are evaluated on the basis of types of faults they identify, size of the test suite and their effectiveness in fault detection. For experiments, various branch statements used and referred in literature are selected. Test cases and mutants were prepared for these branch statements. Mutants were prepared by seeding single operator and operand faults into the statements. The results indicate that for a subset of fault types BOR is effective. A variant of MCDC and RCDC demonstrate better performance on the full class of faults and are only slightly worse than Elmendorfs (CEG) method test suite.

Initial outdoor performance analysis of different PV module technology

This paper presents initial outdoor performance analysis of different PV modules. In this study CdTe, CIGS and Multi-crystalline Silicon technology were tested in outdoor conditions as received from manufacturer. No treatment is given before the testing of the module. I-V translation methodology from IEC 60891 was used to analyse the initial performance of the PV modules at Standard Test Conditions (STC). For all modules, power rating was calculated at STC and frequency distribution of all the power ratings from different observations were plotted using histogram. For each module, the power rating with highest frequency of occurrence was selected and its percentage deviation from the name plate rating was calculated to check initial performance. It was found that many of the modules were not performed as per nameplate value initially at outdoor condition.

Effect of spectrum and temperature on seasonal performance of CdTe technology in composite climate of India

This paper discuss the seasonal performance behaviour of CdTe technology in terms of Performance Ratio (PR) variation. The performance of PV module technology mainly depends on temperature, intensity and spectrum which vary with time of the whole year. The effect of change in spectrum and temperature on CdTe technology has been studied throughout the year. This paper finds that CdTe technology shows better performance season in terms of PR and MMF in summer and monsoon season as compared to the other in composite climate of India.

RPN analysis of field exposed mono crystalline silicon PV modules under composite climate of India

Performance reliability and degradation of 190 mono-crystalline PV modules from 9 different manufactures after 16 years in a power plant with fixed tilt configuration under composite climate of India have been evaluated. The dominant failure mode of PV module in the climate zone is found by using a statistical reliability tool, FMECA. Main objective of this study is to do RPN analysis of 25 different defects observed in these PV modules. It is found that for mono-crystalline silicon modules, under composite climate of India, string interconnect defect of solar cell is found to be dominant failure mode.

Review and extension of fault class hierarchy for testing Boolean specification

Fault hierarchy specifies the inter-relationships amongst various fault classes in terms of their fault detection capability. Kuhn has developed a fault hierarchy for Boolean expression in disjunctive normal form which was complemented by Tsuchiya and Kikuno. Lau and Yu extended the fault hierarchy by adding more fault classes in the hierarchy. In this paper, we give the fault detection criteria for clause disjunction fault CDF and associative shift fault ASF and further extend the fault hierarchy by adding these fault classes in the fault hierarchy.

Generation of mutants for boolean expression

Abstract Fault based testing suffers from biases of the programmer in seeding the faults. There is no formal approach to determine the maximum number of mutants that can be generated for a specific faults type. In this paper, we will examine the various fault categories for Boolean expressions in irreducible Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) and Canonical DNF and estimate the maximum number of faults that can be seeded in a Boolean expression. The results obtained provide a mechanism for the generation of mutants that are not equivalent to the original Boolean expression in irreducible disjunctive normal form.