A Statistical Approach to Model-Based Robustness Testing

Software testing with an operational profile

“…Another cross-section of the literature does not distinguish explicitly between user inputs and other types of system inputs (software, hardware, environmental, etc. ), but these are commonly implicit in the models used (e.g., Markov chains) (see, e.g., Bousquet et al [1998], Brooks and Memon [2007], Hamlet et al [2001], Guen et al [2004], Huang et al [2007], Prowell [2003], Shukla et al [2004a], Popovic and Kovacevic [2007], Whittaker and Thomason [1994], and Woit [1993]). An interesting observation is the fact that in component-based OPs, the originator is unspecified (see Table V).…”

“…It is rare to find in the OP literature approaches that explicitly address this aspect. An approach broaching this issue was proposed by Popovic and Kovacevic [2007]. The authors introduce the concept of stress operational profile to refer to a FSM-based OP extended with additional states and transitions that occur due to invalid inputs.…”

“…As an example of a straightforward usage case, the probability of occurrence of a leaf node in a tree may be conditional on N other predecessor leaf nodes in the tree [Musa 1993]. As another straightforward usage example the OP is 1-conditional for Markov chains (where the next state of the OP model only depends on the current state [Guen et al 2004;Popovic and Kovacevic 2007;Shukla et al 2004a;Whittaker and Thomason 1994]) or unconditional [Elbaum and Narla 2001;Gittens et al 2004;Hamlet et al 2001;Juhlin 1992]. Brooks and Memon [2007] define OPs that are N-conditional, where the element of interest is the input to the GUI application and where dependence lies between N successive inputs.…”

“…Several modeling paradigms are used to describe and build an OP. They include trees [Arora et al 2005;Bousquet et al 1998;Elbaum and Narla 2001;Musa 1993], state-based representations (including Markov chains [Guen et al 2004;Popovic and Kovacevic 2007;Prowell 2003;Whittaker and Thomason 1994], probabilistic event flow graphs [Brooks and Memon 2007], Harel statecharts [Shukla et al 2004a]), and sets [Gittens et al 2004;Hamlet et al 2001;Huang et al 2007, Bousquet et al [1998] Markov and Tree (a tree is a Markov chain with nodes that are trees)…”

Test case generation for the task tree type of architecture

“…Significant research effort has been put into automatic translation of UML [15,16] and GME [17][18][19] models into operational profiles, to make operational profile extensions by adding the information about the structure of the system and about input data [20], and to analyze the sensitivity of software reliability to operational profile errors, by using architecture-based approach [21][22][23]. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the operational profile, i.e.…”