Increasing the Fault Coverage of Tests Derived Against Extended Finite State Machines

Abstract

Abstract. Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) are widely used when deriving tests for checking whether a software implementation meets functional requirements. These tests usually are derived keeping in mind appropriate test purposes such as covering paths, variables, etc. of the specification EFSM. However, it is well known that such tests do not detect many functional faults in an EFSM implementation. In this paper, we propose an approach for increasing the fault coverage of test suites initially derived against the specification EFSM. For this reason, the behavior of the specification EFSM is implemented in Java using a template that is very close to the EFSM description. At the next step, the fault coverage of an initial test suite derived against the specification EFSM is calculated with respect to faults generated by µJava tool. Since the EFSM software implementation is template based, each undetected fault can be easily mapped into a mutant EFSM of the specification machine. Thus, a distinguishing sequence can be derived not for two programs that is very complex but for two machines and there are efficient methods for deriving such a distinguishing sequence for Finite State Machine (FSM) abstractions of EFSMs. As an FSM abstraction, an l-equivalent of an EFSM can be considered that in fact, is a subtree of the successor tree of height l that describes the EFSM behavior under input sequences of length up to l. Such l-equivalents are classical FSMs and if l is not large then a distinguishing sequence can be derived simply enough. The initial test suite augmented with such distinguishing sequences detects much more functional faults in software implementations of a system described by the specification EFSM.