Form-based visual programming languages, which include
electronic spreadsheets and a variety of research systems,
have had a substantial impact on end-user computing.
Research shows that form-based visual programs often contain
faults, and that their creators often have unwarranted
confidence in the reliability of their programs. Despite this
evidence, we$nd no discussion in the research literature of
techniques for testing or assessing the reliability of formbased
visual programs. This paper addresses this lack. We
describe dizerences between the form-based and imperative
programming paradigms, and discuss effects these direrences
have on strategies for testing form-based programs.
We then present several test adequacy criteria for formbased
programs, and illustrate their application. We show
that an analogue to the traditional “all-uses” dataflow test
adequacy criterion is well suited for code-based testing of
form-based visual programs: it provides important errordetection
ability, and can be applied more easily to formbased
programs than to imperative programs.