10.4 Dynamic Analysis – Testing and Coverage Analysis
10.4.1 Overview of Dynamic Testing
Static analysis is a useful and effective way of producing high-quality code. Unfortunately, it can't tell us precisely what the software will do when it's executed. Thus, we have no choice but to resort to running the code itself – dynamic testing. Here, we first look at some of the underlying concepts and practical problems of dynamically testing software. The following section deals with methods used to judge the completeness of such testing: coverage analysis. The two items taken together – dynamic testing and coverage analysis – constitute the component parts of dynamic analysis.
In real-time systems, dynamic testing is widely used to check the behavior of runtime software. The basic approach – shown in Figure 10.14(a) – is to:
- Stimulate the software to be tested
- Measure the resulting responses: