CMPT 473 Course Pages (Spring 2026)

This is the home page for all course materials for Professor Cameron's Spring 2026 offering of CMPT 473 Software Testing, Reliability and Security.

• Course Administration

Course Structure

• Students work in teams of 3-5.

• Three assignments count 10% each
• One project counts 50%
• Weekly quizzes count 20% (2.5% per quiz, best 8 quizzes only)
  • Reading/Quiz Schedule
  • The best 8 quiz policy allows you to miss up to 2 quizzes for medical or other reasons. There are no make-up quizzes.

• Assignments and projects are based on work with existing open-source code projects and their test suites.
  • Groups may use the same open source project for the assignments and the final course project.
  • Alternatively, groups may choose to use different open-source projects at any point.
  • The Parabix project at SFU can be used for assignments and/or the final course project.
    • This project will be assigned to any group unable to determine a project on its own.
    • Intro to Parabix
    • Parabix Git Repository
    • Parabix Testing: Unit, Integration and Regression Testing

Quality Characteristics and Terminology

• Software Quality Characteristics
• Software Quality through Software Process

Software Testing Techniques

• Software Testing: Dynamic Quality Assessment
• Fault Seeding and Mutation Adequacy
• Mutation Operators
  • Research Directions in Mutation Testing
• Mutation Analysis and Testing Slides - Sumner
• White-Box Testing and Adequacy
• Graph-Based Testing - Sumner
• Regression Testing
• Black-Box Testing: The Category-Partition Method
• Case Study: UTF-8 to UTF-16 Transcoder Testing
• Rick Kuhn - Combinatorial Testing Basics (Youtube)
• Linbin Yu; Yu Lei; Raghu N. Kacker; D. Richard Kuhn - ACTS: A Combinatorial Testing Tool (SFU link)
• ACTS Download

Long-Term and Large-Scale Testing

• Life Cycle Test Automation
• Regression Testing
• Tools for Continuous Integration at Google Scale

SQA for Security

• Security: A Fundamental Quality Characteristic
• Fuzz Testing and Sanitizers for Security and Hardening
• The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew

Performance

• Performance Testing and Software Quality

Additional Dimensions of Quality

• Conformance Testing
• Unicode and Internationalization Quality Issues
• Software Refactoring | Investing in Code Quality

Safety

• Introduction to Safety Engineering
• Therac-25 Failure

Additional Topics

• Open Source Software

Test Planning and Course Project

• Test Planning
• Course Project Planning and Requirements

Assignments

• Assignment 1: Mutation Adequacy
• Assignment 2: Testing with Input Space Partitioning
• Assignment 3: SQA for Security