Towards an I/O Conformance Testing Theory for Software Product Lines based on Modal Interface Automata

Abstract

We present an adaptation of input/output conformance (ioco) testing principles to families of similar implementation variants as appearing in product line engineering. Our proposed product line testing theory relies on Modal Interface Automata (MIA) as behavioral specification formalism. MIA enrich I/O-labeled transition systems with may/must modalities to distinguish mandatory from optional behavior, thus providing a semantic notion of intrinsic behavioral variability. In particular, MIA constitute a restricted, yet fully expressive subclass of I/O-labeled modal transition systems, guaranteeing desirable refinement and compositionality properties. The resulting modal-ioco relation defined on MIA is preserved under MIA refinement, which serves as variant derivation mechanism in our product line testing theory. As a result, modal-ioco is proven correct in the sense that it coincides with traditional ioco to hold for every derivable implementation variant. Based on this result, a family-based product line conformance testing framework can be established.

Compositional testing of management conformance for multi-component enterprise applications

“…We plan to adapt our management conformance checking to consider the possibility of replicating a component, based on the recently released replica-aware management protocols [34]. We also plan to include modality to further extend the degree of implementation freedom, similarly to what done in [24] and [25] for other types of I/O conformance testing. Finally, we plan to expand the set of supported means for specifying the management of multi-component applications by adapting our solution to work with other approaches for modelling application management, e.g., the Aeolus component model [1].…”

“…As for (i) implementation freedom, approaches worth mentioning are [23][24][25][26][27]. [23] extends I/O conformance testing to support implementation freedom in software product lines, with behavioural variability controlled by feature selection.…”

“…[23] extends I/O conformance testing to support implementation freedom in software product lines, with behavioural variability controlled by feature selection. [24] and [25] introduce modality in I/O conformance testing, which enables distinguishing mandatory output behaviour from optional output behaviour. Modality is used to enable implementation freedom also in [26] and [27], which lift conformance from trace inclusion to preorders defined by means of alternating simulation relations [28].…”

Compositionality, Decompositionality and Refinement in Input/Output Conformance Testing

“…Amongst others, Bauer et al use interface automata for compositional reasoning [4], whereas Alur et al characterize modal conformance as alternating simulation relation on interface automata [3], and Larsen et al have shown that both views on modal conformance coincide [14]. Based on our own previous work on modal I/O conformance testing [15,16], we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive testing theory by means of a modal I/O conformance relation. More recently, Bujtor et al proposed testing relations on modal transition systems [9] based on (existing) test-suites, rather than being specification-based as our approach.…”

Compositional Liveness-Preserving Conformance Testing of Timed I/O Automata

“…Finally, there are several other ioco-based testing theories. Among others, mioco [33,32,31] (i.e., ioco for modality-based systems) distinguishes optional transition (which may be implemented) from mandatory transitions (which must be implemented). Furthermore, featured-ioco [9] is based on socalled featured transition systems, incorporating feature constraints to to restrict which (pairs of) transitions may be part of the same variant.…”