Testing Java implementations of algebraic specifications

Nunes, Isabel; Luís, Filipe

doi:10.4204/eptcs.111.4

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Concerning the fourth technique presented in this paper, in [13] we tackle this issue by presenting two alternative ways of comparing concrete objects, one that relies only in observers whose result is not of the designated type. In some way this complies with the notion of observable contexts in [6] -all observers but the ones whose result is of the designated type constitute observable contexts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 5-Step Hunt for Faults in Java Implementations of Algebraic Specifications

Nunes

Luís

2013

2013 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops

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Abstract-Executing thorough test suites allows programmers to strengthen the confidence on their software systems. However, given some failed test cases, finding the faults' locations can be a difficult task, thereby techniques that make it easier for the programmer to locate the faulty components are much desirable. In this paper we focus on finding faults in object-oriented, more precisely Java, implementations of data types that are described by algebraic specifications. We capitalize on models for the specification under study and JUnit test suites that cover all axioms of the specification, and present a collection of techniques and underlying methodology, that give the programmer, in a transparent way, a means to locate the fault that causes the implementation to violate the specification. We also present a comparative experiment that was carried out to evaluate this approach where very encouraging results were obtained.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 5-Step Hunt for Faults in Java Implementations of Algebraic Specifications

Nunes

Luís

2013

2013 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops

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“…In practice, although algebraic specifications are little used in industry, several works report on case studies dealing with testing from algebraic specifications (such as testing object‐oriented programmes or test case selection tools ). Mostly, these works are based on equational or conditional specifications for which the initial test set is by construction exhaustive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exhaustive test sets for algebraic specifications

Aiguier

Arnould

Gall

et al. 2016

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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In the context of testing from algebraic specifications, test cases are ground formulas chosen amongst the ground semantic consequences of the specification, according to some possible additional observability conditions. A test set is said to be exhaustive if every programme P passing all the tests is correct and if for every incorrect programme P , there exists a test case on which P fails. Because correctness can be proved by testing on such a test set, it is an appropriate basis for the selection of a test set of practical size. The largest candidate test set is the set of observable consequences of the specification. However, depending on the nature of specifications and programmes, this set is not necessarily exhaustive. In this paper, we study conditions to ensure the exhaustiveness property of this set for several algebraic formalisms (equational, conditional positive, quantifier free and with quantifiers) and several test hypotheses. EXHAUSTIVE TEST SETS FOR ALGEBRAIC SPECIFICATIONS 295 decision procedure, hence are considered to be observable. The notion of observable contexts has been introduced to systematically observe non-observable sorts through successive applications of operations leading to a result of observable sort [16][17][18]. Therefore, equations of non-observable sort are converted into a family of equations built by surrounding terms that occur in the initial equation with the same observable context. This has been particularly used for object-oriented software testing where, by assumption, object states are encapsulated [7,14,19].Because test cases are defined up to observability issues, the notion of correctness is closely related to observability assumptions. Roughly speaking, correctness is reached when there is a (possibly infinite) test set that verifies that any correct (resp. incorrect) programme successfully (resp. unsuccessfully) passes the test. Because any programme that satisfies all test cases has to be considered correct, correctness is defined according to an observational approach similar to those used to define specification refinement [20-24]: a concrete specification is said to be a refinement of an abstract specification if any algebra of the concrete specification is observationally equivalent to an algebra of the abstract specification. Here, by analogy, we say that a programme P is correct with respect to a specification SP if it is equivalent to an algebra of SP, up to the observable formulas in Obs [1,9]. Let us point out that by default, the model class defined by SP is not restricted to a unique model (such as the initial one or the terminal one [25]). Thus, we follow a loose semantics approach, that is the model class associated to SP can contain several models, each of them likely to represent a different programme. The interest is to be able to accept programmes that possibly implement some extra functionalities or properties (contrarily to other approaches considering terminal semantics [14,19]).As usual, SP denotes the set of all semantic consequences of ...

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Testing Java implementations of algebraic specifications

Cited by 2 publications

References 15 publications

A 5-Step Hunt for Faults in Java Implementations of Algebraic Specifications

A 5-Step Hunt for Faults in Java Implementations of Algebraic Specifications

Exhaustive test sets for algebraic specifications

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