Topic: Cause Effect Graphing Techniques.

Cause Effect Graphing Techniques.
Translation of natural language descriptions of procedures to software based algorithms is error prone.
Example: From US Army Corps of Engineers:
Executive Order 10358 provides in the case of an employee whose work week varies from the normal Monday through Friday work week, that Labor Day and Thanksgiving Day each were to be observed on the next succeeding workday when the holiday fell on a day outside the employee’s regular basic work week. Now, when Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day or any of the new Monday holidays are outside an employee’s basic workbook, the immediately preceding workday will be his holiday when the non-workday on which the holiday falls is the second non-workday or the non-workday designated as the employee’s day off in lieu of Saturday. When the non-workday on which the holiday falls is the first non-workday or the non-workday designated as the employee’s day off in lieu of Sunday, the holiday observance is moved to the next succeeding workday.

How do you test code, which attempts to implement this?
Cause-effect graphing attempts to provide a concise representation of logical combinations and corresponding actions.
1. Causes (input conditions) and effects (actions) are listed for a module and an identifier is assigned to each.
2. A cause-effect graph developed.
3. Graph converted to a decision table.
4. Decision table rules are converted to test cases.