Assessing test adequacy for black-box systems without specifications
ICTSS'11 Proceedings of the 23rd IFIP WG 6.1 international conference on Testing software and systems
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Software specification is an important element of the software development process. However, in most cases the specifications are out-of-date or even missing. One solution for this kind of problem is to use some process that infers the specification automatically. Work by Ernst et al [9, 22] has shown how specifications can be generated using pro- gram execution traces. These approaches are dependent on the test suites used to produce the traces, which may lead to unreliable specifications being inferred. Such specifica- tion inference is highly useful, however. In this paper we show how search based testing techniques can challenge and identify erroneous elements of such inferred specifica- tions. This leads to a much tighter (accurate) inferred spec- ifications. Thus, specification inference and search based test data generation are shown to be complementary.