Special Collection on Program Testing.

This special collection of papers had its genesis at the IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Software Testing and Test Documentation held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida during December 18-20, 1978. This collection is devoted to selected papers on program testing that were presented at the Workshop. The thrust is towards approaches that can support the heuristic components of testing. There is increasing recognition that it is unlikely there will be a grand theory of testing which will lead to fully automated testing systems. Instead the tester will be called upon to use his intuition and problem-dependent knowledge in a discipline manner to test for a variety of specified error types. But it is crucial that this less ambitious, heuristic activity be nevertheless firmly embedded in an underlying framework which is logical, rigorous and well-understood.