An industrial experiment in automatic generation of executable test suites for a cache coherency protocol

Kahlouche, H.; Viho, César; Zendri, Massimo

doi:10.1007/978-0-387-35381-4_13

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This requires to refine the models of masters and slaves to match those used in the SoC. Second, the formal model can be used to guide test and validation, as a reference model for co-simulation or by (automatically) extracting interesting test scenarios [11,5]. For instance, the counterexamples of Section 4 seem interesting test cases for any ACE-compliant interconnect.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal Analysis of the ACE Specification for Cache Coherent Systems-on-Chip

Kriouile

Serwe

2013

Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures integrate now many different components, such as processors, accelerators, memory, and I/O blocks, some but not all of which may have caches. Because the validation effort with simulation-based validation techniques, as currently used in industry, grows exponentially with the complexity of the SoC, we investigate in this paper the use of formal verification techniques. More precisely, we use the CADP toolbox to develop and validate a generic formal model of an SoC compliant with the recent ACE specification proposed by ARM to implement system-level coherency.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal Analysis of the ACE Specification for Cache Coherent Systems-on-Chip

Kriouile

Serwe

2013

Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We reviewed case studies on modelbased testing of processors [5,12,7], smart cards [11,4], protocols [9,1], Java and POSIX [6], by taking into account related work [2,10,8]. We identified five principles: functional, data, communication, and temporal abstractions.…”

Section: Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In protocol testing [9], causally dependent operations concerning the same transaction are collapsed into one atomic operation in the model although the concrete representation can be interrupted by other operations.…”

Section: Examples For Communication Abstractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstractions for Model-Based Testing

Prenninger

Pretschner

2005

Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The idea of model-based testing is to compare the I/O behavior of an explicit behavior model with that of a system under test. This requires the model to be valid. If the model is a simplification of the SUT, then it is easier to check the model and use it for subsequent test case generation than to directly check the SUT. In this case, the different levels of abstraction must be bridged. Not surprisingly, experience shows that choosing the right level of abstraction is crucial to the success of model-based testing. We argue that models for specification purposes, models for test generation, and models for full code generation are likely to be different. The paper classifies and discusses different abstractions. It is intended as a step towards guidelines for those who build behavior models to the end of testing.

show abstract

“…Also a part of the TTCN test suite produced by ATM Forum has been checked with VTS (for soundness and laxity) [17] and some errors due to asynchronism were detected. Lotos: Several experiments [20], [21] consisted in using TGV on specifications of a multiprocessor architecture of Bull. Produced test cases have been executed by Bull on a simulator of the architecture.…”

Section: Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

TGV: theory, principles and algorithms

Jard

Jéron

2004

Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer

256

160

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents the TGV tool allowing the automatic synthesis of conformance test cases from a formal specification of a reactive system. TGV has been developped by Irisa Rennes and Verimag Grenoble, with the support of the Vasy team of Inria Rhônes-Alpes. The paper describes the main elements of the underlying testing theory, based on a model of transitions system which distinguishes inputs, outputs and internal actions, and based on the concept of conformance relation. The principles of the test synthesis process are explained as well as the main algorithms. We then describe the main characteristics of the TGV tool. As a conclusion, we describe some on going works in test synthesis. I. CONFORMANCE TESTINGTesting, in all its variations, is one of the most used validation techniques. In this paper, we focus on conformance testing applied to reactive systems. By reactive system, we mean a software component which reacts to stimuli of its environment. Conformance testing consists in checking that the behavior of a real implementation of a reactive system (IUT for Implementation Under Test) is correct with respect to a specification. The code of the IUT is unknown, and its behavior is only visible by interaction with a tester which controls and observes the IUT through dedicated interfaces (called PCO for Points of Control and Observation). Conformance testing is a type of functional testing of a black box nature. A. Some basic conceptsIn the context of telecommunication protocols, the main concepts of this activity are described in the standard ISO 9646 [1]. Some of them are introduced here.A test case is an elementary test targeted to testing a particular functionality, called test purpose. A test suite is a set of test cases. The basic elements of a test case are interactions through PCO: outputs are stimuli sent in order to control the IUT's input events, inputs are observations of the IUT's output events. Inputs may lead to different verdicts. A Fail verdict denotes a divergence with the expected behaviour and the IUT is rejected. A Pass verdict is returned if the observation is correct and the test purpose is reached. An Inconclusive verdict is returned if a correct behavior is observed, but it is impossible to reach the test purpose. This is due to the fact that, in general, reactive systems cannot be completely controlled by a tester: it may have several outputs to the same input. The tester, specialized hardware, software or human operator, executes test cases. But as test cases are often described with some abstraction level (they are called abstract test cases), they must be translated into executable test cases. B. Formalizing for automationConformance testing is a costly activity which takes an important part in the global cost of a software. For a long time, the scientific community tries to automate the process of deriving test cases. For conformance testing, the reference behaviour is described by the specification which determines the verdicts. Automation thus induces formalizing the ...

show abstract

An industrial experiment in automatic generation of executable test suites for a cache coherency protocol

Cited by 17 publications

References 7 publications

Formal Analysis of the ACE Specification for Cache Coherent Systems-on-Chip

Formal Analysis of the ACE Specification for Cache Coherent Systems-on-Chip

Abstractions for Model-Based Testing

TGV: theory, principles and algorithms

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About