5th International Workshop on

Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems

Berlin, April 3-4, 2000

Specification-based Testing of Synchronous Software

Test data generation and test execution are both time-consuming activities when done manually. Automated testing meth-ods promise to save a great deal of human effort. This especially applies to reactive programs which have complex behaviors over time and which require long test sequences.

In this article, we present Lutess, a testing environment for synchronous reactive software. Lutess produces automatically and dynamically test data with respect to some environment constraints of the program under test. Moreover, it allows to trace the test execution and spot the situations where the program violates its properties.

Lutess offers several specification-based testing methods. They aim at simulating more realistic environment behaviors, producing relevant data to test thoroughly a given property or driving the program under test into interesting situations. To produce the test data, the methods use different types of guides: statistical distribution of the input generation, properties, or behavioral patterns.

Lutess proved to be powerful and easy to use in industrial case studies. Lutess won the Best Tool Award of the First Feature Interaction Detection Contest. The tool is described hereafter from both practical and formal points of view.

Note: The content of the following files is part of GMD Report No. 91 and subject to its copyright.

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Last modified: Wednesday, 19-Apr-2000 08:57:51 MET DST, Axel Rennoch