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Advances in Software Tools for Scientific Computing pp 225–237Cite as

The Evolution and Testing of a Medium Sized Numerical Package

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering ((LNCSE,volume 10))

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of a medium sized software package, LA-PACK, through its public releases over the last six years and establish a correlation, at a subprogram level, between a simply computable software metric value and the number of coding errors detected in the released routines. We also quantify the code changes made between issues of the package and attempt to categorize the reasons for these changes.

We then consider the testing strategy used with LAPACK. Currently this consists of a large number of mainly self-checking driver programs along with sets of configuration files. These suites of test codes run a very large number of test cases and consume significant amounts of cpu time. We attempt to quantify how successful this testing strategy is from the viewpoint of the coverage of the executable statements within the routines being tested.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, UK

    David Barnes & Tim Hopkins

Authors
  1. David Barnes
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  2. Tim Hopkins
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1080, 0316, Oslo, Norway

    Hans Petter Langtangen

  2. Numerical Objects A.S., P.O. Box 124 Blindern, 0314, Oslo, Norway

    Are Magnus Bruaset

  3. SINTEF Applied Mathematics, P.O. Box 124 Blindern, 0314, Oslo, Norway

    Ewald Quak

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Barnes, D., Hopkins, T. (2000). The Evolution and Testing of a Medium Sized Numerical Package. In: Langtangen, H.P., Bruaset, A.M., Quak, E. (eds) Advances in Software Tools for Scientific Computing. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol 10. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57172-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57172-5_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66557-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-57172-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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