<p>To gain confidence in that a dynamic real-time system behaves correctly, we test it. Automated verification & validation can be used to conduct testing of such systems in an effective and economic way.</p><p>An event monitor can be used as a part of a test oracle to monitor the system that is being tested. The test oracle could use the data (i.e., the streams of events) derived from the tested system, to determine if an executed test case gave a positive or negative result. To do this, the test oracle compares the streams of events received from the event monitor with the event expressions derived from the formal specification, and decides if the executed test case has responded positive or negative. Any deviations between observed behaviour and accepted behaviour should be reported by the test oracle as a negative result. If the executed test case gave a negative result, the monitor part should signal this to the reporter part of the test oracle.</p><p>This work aims to investigate how the event expressions can be derived from the formal specification, and in particular, how the event specification language Solicitor can be used to represent these event expressions.</p><p>We also discuss the need for parameterized event types in Solicitor, and any other event specification languages used in event monitoring. We also show that support for parameterized event types is a significant requirement for such languages.</p>

Habilitationsschrift--Fachbereich Altertumswissenschaft--Berlin--Freie Universität, 1989. / Contient des textes en égyptien. Bibliogr. p. [XIII]-XXIX. Index.

Teilw. zugl.: Oxford, University, Diss., 2003. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

This study examines the theological purpose of the oracles against the nations in the book of Ezekiel (Ezek. 25-32). Through detailed exegesis, this thesis contends that the recognition formula, 'they shall know that I am Yahweh', is the vehicle for this theological purpose since it is fundamentally a statement of the vindication of Yahweh. Having specified in chapter 1 that the primary thesis is supported by two further theses, 'the recognition formula illuminates Yahweh's wrath and his mercy', and 'the recognition formula invites a human response', the work begins with a review of recent Ezekiel research in general that includes a background sketch delineating the context and authorship of the book. Possible original settings of oracles against nations are discussed, as well as a survey of topical scholarly output. A review of work undertaken on the recognition formula continues the preliminary discussion. In chapter 2, the basic form of the saying is defined and this allows the phrases that have expansions or are related by close resemblance to be categorised. The study proceeds with a consideration of the formula found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Chapter 3 examines the formula as it appears in Ezekiel outside the oracles against the nations, paying particular attention to the formula's expansions. In chapter 4, detailed exegesis begins with the oracles against Israel's Palestinian neighbours. It is suggested that Ezekiel uses language for its potential to remind the people of their own culpability and the possibility is mooted that Ezekiel is projecting the guilt and punishment of Israel onto the nations. Chapter 5 contends that Ezekiel's illustrations are aimed at alleviating the exiles' concern about the future by helping them appreciate a bifurcated reality of the unseen present, and that the purpose of the oracles against the nations may be perceived when the relationship between divine wrath and divine mercy is understood to be elucidated by the above theses concerning the recognition formula.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / A pesquisa investiga o texto profético de Isaías 65.17-25 por meio da análise semiótica discursiva aplicada à exegese bíblica para mostrar como a salvação é imaginada e concebida nesse anúncio. Basicamente, procura observar como o texto caracteriza o sujeito, o tempo e o espaço da salvação. O que se verifica é que a salvação descrita no texto reflete uma integração do ser humano com Deus, com seu meio de vida e ambiente, e reflete uma fusão de realidade cósmica e local. A partir da identificação do texto como um anúncio de salvação por meio da análise do gênero literário, a análise do texto procura contribuir com a reflexão teológica sobre o conceito de salvação do movimento da Missão Integral no contexto da teologia evangélica protestante da América Latina. O primeiro capítulo examina a história da interpretação desse texto desde o uso pelos autores do Novo Testamento até os desenvolvimentos recentes da exegese bíblica. O segundo capítulo investiga as diversas problemáticas em torno da busca do sentido nas ciências hermenêuticas, linguísticas e exegéticas, e apresenta o referencial teórico e a metodologia para a análise do texto. Seguindo o critério semiótico discursivo o texto é analisado primeiramente no seu plano de expressão, no capítulo três, e em seguida no seu plano de conteúdo, no capítulo quatro. / This thesis examines the prophetic text of Isaiah 65.17-25 through a semiotic discursive analysis applied to biblical exegesis to demonstrate how this text characterizes the persons, time and space of salvation. It is shown that the salvation described in the text reflect the integration of the human being with God, with the social and life contexts, and it reflects the unity of the local and the cosmic realities. From the identification by form criticism of the literary unit as an oracle of salvation, this analysis seeks to contribute to the theological reflection of the concept of salvation of the Integral Mission movement in the context of the protestant evangelical theology of Latin America. The first chapter examines the history of interpretation of the text, starting with its use by the New Testament writers to the recent developments of biblical exegesis. The second chapter investigates several issues concerning the search for meaning in the hermeneutics, linguistics and exegetical studies. It also presents the theoretical and methodological references for the analysis. Following a semiotic discursive criteria for the analysis of a text, chapter three analyzes the expression of the text and, chapter four, the content.

No desenvolvimento de software, a qualidade do produto está diretamente relacionada à qualidade do processo de desenvolvimento. Diante disso, atividades de Verificação, Validação & Teste (VV&T) realizadas por meio de métodos, técnicas e ferramentas são de extrema necessidade para o aumento da produtividade, qualidade e diminuição de custos no desenvolvimento de software. Do mesmo modo, técnicas e critérios contribuem para a produtividade das atividades de teste. Um ponto crucial para o teste de software é sua automatização, tornando as atividades mais confiáveis e diminuindo significativamente os custos de desenvolvimento. Na automatização dos testes, os oráculos são essenciais, representando um mecanismo (programa, processo ou dados) que indica se a saída obtida para um caso de teste está correta. Este trabalho de mestrado utiliza a ideia de mutação para criar implementações alternativas de oráculos de teste e, assim, avaliar a sua qualidade. O teste de mutação se refere à criação de versões do sistema em desenvolvimento com pequenas alterações sintáticas de código. A mutação possui alta eficácia na detecção de defeitos e é bastante flexível na sua aplicação, podendo ser utilizada em diversos tipos de artefatos. Adicionalmente, este trabalho propõe operadores de mutação específicos para oráculos, implementa uma ferramenta de apoio à utilização desses operadores para oráculos e também descreve um estudo empírico dos operadores, destacando benefícios e desafios associados ao seu uso. / In software development, product quality is directly related to the quality of the development process. Therefore, activities of Verification, Validation & Testing (VV&T) performed by methods, techniques and tools are urgently required to increase productivity, quality and cost reduction in software development. Similarly, testing technique and criteria contribute to the productivity of test activities. A crucial point for the software testing automation is making the most reliable activities and significantly reducing development costs. Regarding software testing automation, test oracles are essential, representing an mechanism (program, process or data) to indicate whether the actual output for a given test case is correct. This masters thesis aims to explore concepts of mutation testing to create alternative implementations of the oracle procedure and thus assess their quality. Mutation testing refers to the creation of system development versions with minor syntactic code changes. It has high efficiency on defects detecting and it is very flexible in its application and it is being used in various types of artifacts. This work also proposes specific mutation operators for oracles, implements an useful support tool for using these oracle mutation operators and conducts an empirical study of operators, highlighting benefits and challenges associated with their use.

O propósito desta dissertação é apresentar algumas idéias sobre o emprego das palavras relacionadas à visão no texto do Livro I das Histórias de Heródoto. O principal destaque é dado à relação entre ver e saber e as investigações de Heródoto. O segundo propósito, decorrente do primeiro, é verificar a importância dos oráculos no Livro I e buscar a relação (se existe) entre oráculos, sonhos, visões e a busca do conhecimento. / The purpose of this dissertation is to show some ideas about the use of words related to sight in the text of HerodotusHistories, Book I . The main focus is given to the existing relationship between seeing and knowing and Herodotus researches. The second purpose, built from the first one, is to evaluate the importance of oracles described in Book I and to seek the relationship of (if it exists) oracles, dreams, visions and the search for knowledge.

To gain confidence in that a dynamic real-time system behaves correctly, we test it. Automated verification &amp; validation can be used to conduct testing of such systems in an effective and economic way. An event monitor can be used as a part of a test oracle to monitor the system that is being tested. The test oracle could use the data (i.e., the streams of events) derived from the tested system, to determine if an executed test case gave a positive or negative result. To do this, the test oracle compares the streams of events received from the event monitor with the event expressions derived from the formal specification, and decides if the executed test case has responded positive or negative. Any deviations between observed behaviour and accepted behaviour should be reported by the test oracle as a negative result. If the executed test case gave a negative result, the monitor part should signal this to the reporter part of the test oracle. This work aims to investigate how the event expressions can be derived from the formal specification, and in particular, how the event specification language Solicitor can be used to represent these event expressions. We also discuss the need for parameterized event types in Solicitor, and any other event specification languages used in event monitoring. We also show that support for parameterized event types is a significant requirement for such languages.

This thesis deals with late antiquity literary work, dating probably from second half of 2nd century CE, known as Chaldaean Oracles. These are written in Greek and preserved only in fragments. It's content is a philosophical and religious system, which fuses together middle-platonic philosophy and oriental religious traditions The aim of this thesis is to present doctrine of the literary work in question as well as the associated ritual practice (called theurgy) and then to analyze this system and compare it with similar movements, especially with Hermetism and Gnosticism. To achive this, I use the methodology of R. Chlup, based on the concept of so called "wordlviews". These are implicit assumptions and choices in ideological systems. I then try to connect the Chaldaean wordlview with it's supposed social context. The result of this analysis is that the image of the world in the Chaldaean Oracles is considerably positive, with the emphasis on the unity of all. It thus constitutues an antipole of certain sort to the largely negative and dualistic Gnosticism, with which it shares similar metaphysical concepts. The supplement of this thesis contains the Greek original of extant fragments together with author's original Czech translation. Key words: Chaldaean Oracles, theurgy, late antiquity, worldview

Software testing is one of the most important Software Engineering processes, being the primary activity to check the conformance between the software requirements and its actual behavior. The automation of software testing activities is essential to certify productivity and effectiveness in such activities. Test automation leads testing activities to be conducted under systematic and accurate criteria, raising the chance of testers to reveal faults or inconsistencies. Test oracles are elementary members in software testing automation, being the mechanism responsible for indicating the correctness of software outputs. In testing environments, test oracles can be effectively implemented based on several sources of information about the Software Under Testing (SUT): software specifications, assertions, formal methods (Finite State Machines (FSM), formal specifications, etc, machine-learning methods, and metamorphic relations. Regardless of the implementation strategy, test oracles are vulnerable to false positive/negative verdicts, configuring what the literature describes as the oracle problem. Therefore, test oracles are a non-trivial and challenging object of studies of the software engineering research area. SUTs outputs in unusual formats make it harder the oracle problem. Audio, images, three-dimensional objects, virtual reality environments, complex statistical compositions, etc, are examples of non-trivial output formats. In the software testing context, SUTs with unusual outputs can be called complex-output systems. In this doctorate dissertation, we propose and evaluate a novel test oracle approach for complex-output systems called feature-based test oracles. The purpose of feature-based test oracles is the appropriation of a processing image technique called Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) to collect information from features extracted from the SUTs outputs to compose test oracles. Given a query image, CBIR combines feature extraction and similarity functions to alleviate the problem of searching for digital images in large databases. In previous research, we have integrated CBIR concepts in a testing framework to support the automation of testing activities in processing image systems and systems with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). In this doctorate dissertation, we extended that framework and its concepts to general complex-output systems, addressing the feature-based test oracle approach. We use Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems to validate empirically our test oracle technique. Through the results of five empirical analyses, three of them conducted in line with problems of a real-world industry TTS system, show the proposed technique is a valuable instrument to automate testing activities and alleviate practitioners efforts on testing complex output systems. We conclude the proposed test oracles are effective because they systematically evaluate the SUTs sensorial output rather than produce verdicts based on subjective specifications. As future work, we plan to conduct investigations towards the reduction of false positives/negatives and the association of the test oracles with machine learning techniques and metamorphic relations. / Teste de Software é um dos processos mais importantes da Engenharia de Software, sendo a principal atividade para averiguar a conformidade de requisitos de software e suas saídas. A automatização das atividades de teste é essencial para conferir produtividade e efetividade em tais atividades. A automatização faz com que atividades de teste sejam conduzidas sob critérios sistemáticos e precisos, aumentando a chance dos testadores de revelarem falhas ou inconcistências. Oráculos de teste são membros elementares na automatização do teste de software, sendo o mecanismo responsável por indicar a corretude das saídas do softwre. Em ambientes de teste, oráculos de teste podem ser efetivamente implementados com base em diversos fontes de informação sobre o sistema em teste: especificações de software, assertivas, métodos formais (máquinas de estados finitas, especificações formais, etc), métodos de aprendizagem de máquina e relações metamórficas. Independente da estratégia de implementação, oráculos de teste são vulneráveis a veridictos de falsos positivos/negativos, configurando o que é apresentado na literatura como O problema do Oráculo. Então, na área de engenharia de software, oráculos de teste são objetos de estudo não-triviais e desafiadores. O problema de oráculo é potencializado quando as saídas do sistema em teste são dadas em formatos não triviais como, por exemplo, audio, imagens, objetos tridimensionais, ambientes de realidade virtual, composições estatísticas complexas, etc. No contexto do teste de software, sistemas com saídas não triviais podem ser chamados de sistemas com saídas complexas. Esta tese de doutorado propões e avalia uma nova estratégia de oráculo de teste para sistemas com saídas complexas. O propósito de tal estratégia é a apropriação da técnica de processamento de imagem conhecida como CBIR (Recuperação de Imagem Basead em Conteúdo CBIR) para coletar informações de características extratídas do sistema em teste, compondo oráculos de teste. A partir de uma imagem de busca, o CBIR combina extração de características e funções de similaridade para aliviar problemas de busca em grandes based de imagens digitais. Em pesquisas anteriores, conceitos de CBIR foram integrados em um arcabouço de teste para apoiar a automatização de atividades de teste em systemas de processamento de imagens e sistemas com interfaces gráficas. Esta tese de doutorado estende o arcabouço e seus conceitos para sistemas com saídas complexas em geral. Sistemas Texto-Fala (TTS) foram utlizados para validações empíricas. Os resultados de seis análises empíricas, duas delas condizidas em consonância com problemas de um TTS industrial, revelam que a técnica proposta é um valioso instrumento para automatizar atividaes de teste e aliviar esforços de profissionais da indústria ao teste sistemas com saídas complexas. Conclui-se que a efetividade dos oráculos de teste propostos são devido às sistemáticas análises do conteúdo das saídas dos sistemas em teste, em vez da análises de especificações subjetivas. Os trabalhos futuros vislumbrados devem ser conduzidos no intuito de reduzir número de falsos positivos/negativos e a associação dos oráculos de teste com técnicas de aprendizado de máquina e relações metamórficas.