The aim of software testing is to assess the behavior and quality of a software system. Testing is extremely costly (approximately 50% of overall software development costs) and time consuming. There are now serious efforts to introduce automatic testing systems to reduce cost and time of the software testing.

Formal specifications are currently being used in software development, which has made specification-based testing important. The approach of this research is to use Z formal specifications to generate the test cases. Since Z specifications are not executable, we use PROLOG specifications, which is translated from Z specifications, to generate test cases. The test driver then executes the program under the test cases and compares the program outputs with the expected outputs.

The thesis describes the design and implementation of an automatic testing system called PROBE, using the new testing approach. The PROBE system uses four tools: Z-specifications into PROLOG-specifications translator (which is already available), test case generator, input/output analyzer and test driver.