Specification based test sequence generation with propositional logic

Abstract

In the domain of concurrent reactive systems, much work has been devoted to (semi‐)automatically validating a system's correctness. In this paper a novel approach to the automated generation of test sequences is presented. It may be used for both glass box testing a specification and black box testing an implementation (software/hardware). Finite system models specified within the CASE tool AutoFocus as well as user‐friendly test case specifications are automatically translated into propositional logic and fed into the propositional solver SATO. Results are interpreted as input/output traces (test sequences) of the system, and may be displayed as message sequence charts. A small example illustrates the basic ideas as well as the method's advantages and shortcomings. The testing process is integrated into an overall development process. Main contributions include the implementation of a tool for graphical specification of test cases and the description of an efficient method to compute test sequences fully automatically as well as its integration into the same CASE tool. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using formal specifications to support testing

“…Model-checking and theorem-proving are not the only two techniques for test generation, papers [Gotlieb et al 1998;Pretschner et al 2005] employ constraint logic programming; propositional satisfiability techniques are used in [Wimmel et al 2000;Marinov and Khurshid 2001].…”

Model-based testing for real

“…Model checking with SMV required 30 (20) seconds, 112464 (73145) BDD nodes and 3 (2.5) MB storage. Bounded model checking [32] with SATO fails to find these examples. Our approach with best-first search (see above, [26]) succeeds in finding the test case in less than 0.01 seconds.…”

Generating Test Data for Specification-Based Tests Via Quasirandom Sequences

“…The two common strategies are black-box testing, driven by specification of software [22], and white box testing, driven by the software structure [16]. Specification-based testing, whose inputs are derived from a specification, is black-box testing.…”