Testing object-oriented programs is still a hard task, despite many studies on criteria to better cover the test space. Test criteria establish requirements one want to achieve in testing programs to help in finding software defects. On the other hand, program verification guarantees that a program preserves its specification but its application is not very straightforward in many cases. Both program testing and verification are expensive tasks and could be used to complement each other. This paper presents a new approach to automate and integrate testing and program verification for fault-tolerant systems. In this approach we show how to assess information from programs verification in order to reduce the test space regarding exceptions definition/use testing criteria. As properties on exception-handling mechanisms are checked using a model checker (Java PathFinder), programs are traced. Information from these traces can be used to realize how much testing criteria have been covered, reducing the further program test space.
The more complex to develop and manage systems the more software design faults increase, making fault-tolerant systems highly required. To ensure their quality, the normal and exceptional behaviors must be tested and/or verified. Software testing is still a difficult and costly software development task and a reasonable amount of effort has been employed to develop techniques for testing programs' normal behaviors. For the exceptional behavior, however, there is a lack of techniques and tools to effectively test it. To help in testing and analyzing fault-tolerant systems, we present in this paper a tool that provides an automatic generation of data-flow test cases for objects and exceptionhandling mechanisms of Java programs and data/control-flow graphs for program analysis.
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