A static measure of a subset of intra-procedural data flow testing coverage based on node coverage

In the past years, a number of research works, which have been mostly based on pre and post dominator analysis, have been presented about finding subsets of nodes and edges (called "unrestricted subsets") such that their traversal during execution (if feasible) exercises respectively all feasible nodes and edges in a Control Flow Graph (CFG).This paper presents an approach to statically measure a subset of intra-procedural data flow ("all uses") coverage obtained by exercising an "unrestricted subset" of nodes during testing. This measure indicates the possible degree of data flow testing obtainable while using a weaker test coverage criteria.The approach has been implemented in C++ on a PC under Linux and results obtained from the analysis of "Gnu find tool", which is about 16 KLOC of C-language source code, are presented together with discussions and conclusions.