Testing pervasive software in the presence of context inconsistency resolution services

Abstract

Pervasive computing software adapts its behavior according to the changing contexts. Nevertheless, contexts are often noisy. Context inconsistency resolution provides a cleaner pervasive computing environment to context-aware applications. A faulty context-aware application may, however, mistakenly mix up inconsistent contexts and resolved ones, causing incorrect results. This paper studies how such faulty context-aware applications may be affected by these services. We model how programs should handle contexts that are continually checked and resolved by context inconsistency resolution, develop novel sets of data flow equations to analyze the potential impacts, and thus formulate a new family of test adequacy criteria for testing these applications. Experimentation shows that our approach is promising.

Weaving Context Sensitivity into Test Suite Construction

“…A context-aware application p may associate with a set of environment attributes, which can be characterized by context variable [6]: We are interested in how a testing technique uses the contextual value, and thus, in the rest of the paper, we simply write value rather than (field t =value: type, time). A sequence of context instances is called a context stream.…”

“…We use the application scenario of Conveyor Belt described in [6] as the motivating example, which is as follows.…”

“…For instance, a package detected by r2 via reader3 may be closest to reader2. To tackle such kinds of problem, the program designs one Context Inconsistency Resolution (CIR) service [6] to detect and resolve inconsistent reports of package positions, which is a context dropping service. The CIR service specifies the constraint q 1 to assure that p.position should be increased monotonically.…”

“…We use the fault in [6] to motivate our work. The fault is at the statement #10, in which all "" are implemented wrongly as "".…”

An Empirical Study of the Use of Frankl-Weyuker Data Flow Testing Criteria to Test BPEL Web Services

“…In particular, Lu et al [17] studies how to test programs when its contexts may be affected by connected services. Mei et al [19] presents a new data structure to quantify XPath and new testing criteria to assure WS-BPEL programs.…”