Formal Approaches to Model Based Testing

基于状态的形式化，如有限状态机（FSM）、通信状态机（CFSM）、状态图、UML及其扩展，已被广泛用于指定不同领域的系统行为，如机器学习、交互系统、反应系统、web服务和电信，以及描述并发和分布式系统的控制结构。在此背景下，建议研究的目标是开发从基于状态的系统的规范/需求生成有效测试套件的正式方法。由于基于状态的形式化通常用于捕获此类系统的规范/需求，因此在开发过程中经常使用基于模型的测试技术。本研究解决了从基于状态的形式化的系统规范/需求中构建测试套件的问题。主要目标是从基于状态的系统的规范和需求中提高测试生成的技术水平。将寻求产生可用于确定实现是否符合其规范和/或要求的测试的正式方法。可以预期，为构建测试套件而开发的技术也可以用于减少手动或半自动化方法获得的测试套件。本研究还将包括从多进程规范和设计中生成测试，以便结果测试可以应用于分布式测试架构，而不会遇到可控性和可观察性问题。基于需求的回归测试也是本研究的一部分，其中将利用不断发展的系统的需求差异来i)生成回归测试套件，ii)从现有测试套件中选择回归测试套件，iii)减少手工构建的回归测试套件。需求的连续模型中的差异将形成一个基础，用于识别在模型和测试系统中所做的修改的效果。通过利用这些确定的效果，将形成回归测试套件。早期基于需求的回归测试工作一次只考虑一个修改的影响。这显然是不现实的，所有修改一个版本，以获得其后继版本需要一并考虑。因此，本研究将相应地修改修改效果的定义，现有的回归测试套件生成、减少和选择方法将受益于本研究的结果，因为它们的准确性提高了。***********

Summary***State-based formalisms such as Finite State Machine (FSM), Communicating FSM (CFSM), State-Charts, UML and their extensions have been widely used to specify the behavior of systems in diverse areas such as machine learning, interactive systems, reactive systems, web services, and telecommunications as well as to describe the control structure of concurrent and distributed systems.***Within this context, the objectives of the proposed research are to develop formal methods for generation of effective test suites from specifications/requirements of state-based systems. Since state-based formalisms are commonly used to capture specifications/requirements of such systems, model based testing techniques are often employed during their development. This study addresses the problem of the construction of test suites from system specifications/requirements given in a state-based formalism. Main objective is to improve the state of the art in test generation from specifications and requirements of state-based systems. Formal approaches will be sought that will yield tests that can be used to determine the conformance of the implementations to their specifications and/or requirements. It is anticipated that the techniques developed for the construction of test suites may also be used for the reduction of test suites obtained manually or by semi-automated means. This study will also include generation of tests from multi-process specifications and designs such that the resulting tests can be applied in distributed test architectures without encountering controllability and observability problems. Requirements based regression testing is also a part of this study where differences in the requirements of evolving systems will be utilized to i) generate regression test suites, ii) select regression test suites from existing test suites, iii) reduce regression test suites constructed manually. The differences in successive models of requirements will form a basis for identifying the effects of the modifications made in the models and the system under test. By utilizing these identified effects, regression test suites will be formed. Earlier works on requirements based regression testing consider the effects of each modification one at a time. This clearly is not realistic and all modifications made on a version to obtain its successor version need to be considered altogether. Hence, this study will revise the definitions of effects of modifications accordingly and the existing methods for regression test suite generation, reduction, and selection will benefit from the results of this study for their increased accuracy.***********