In commercial hardware development, it is a common practice to capture the requirements and specifications in a formal manner and use them extensively in the development and testing of the products. In contrast, software poses new challenges in terms of feasibility of the capture of such information and its use. A software development organization typically faces:

• Ever changing requirements
• Lack of maturity in formal techniques
• Enormous pressure on time to market
• A belief in the malleability of software that whatever is produced can be repaired and/or expanded later with suitable changes.

The result is that organizations try desperately to test quality into products, making software testing difficult and expensive. The complexity due to the new demands (e.g. distributed networking environment, the need for coexistence of heterogeneous platforms, etc.) make the already difficult problem, impossible. To meet this extraordinary challenge, we are working on technology targeting a typical software tester as our customer. Our goal is to provide useful tools for increasing the skill and the productivity (in terms of effort and effectiveness) of the software tester in the areas of function test and system/application test. In these phases, testing is currently very expensive due to the manual nature and limited (or non existent) availability of suitable tools.

Evaluating Test Effectiveness Using ODC: No matter how you end up in planning and executing test in your organization, you need a way to evaluate how effective your testing is. Here is a proven way to do that.