Speaker: Guy Wolf

Title: Differential Unit-Tests
 
Abstract:
 
Every software application, system or component that is developed
must be tested to ensure it qualifies with the requested standards
(whether commercial or academic). Often tests are conducted on a new
version of existing software and are aimed at finding the differences
between the production version and a newly developed version.
Differential Tests is a term used for such tests conducted at system
level and there have been some researches on automatic tools for
constructing and running them. In this presentation we'll talk about
a new term called Differential Unit-Tests used for a combination of
Unit-Tests (aimed at testing a single code-unit at a time) and
Defferential Tests. Differential Unit-Tests are used for finding the
differences between two implementations (e.g. versions) of a
component or a system at the object level and are thus more suitable
for testings object-oriented programs. They may also be regarded as a
smarter kind of Unit-Tests using dynamic expectations (specified by a
"correct" implementation) instead of static ones (hard-coded by the
developer).
Based on a paper by Xie, Taneja, Kale and Marinov