Coverage criteria for state based specifications

  • Authors:

  • Paul Ammann;Jeff Offutt;Wuzhi Xu

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information and Software Engineering, George Mason University;Department of Information and Software Engineering, George Mason University;Department of Information and Software Engineering, George Mason University

  • Venue:
  • Formal methods and testing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Test engineers often face the task of developing a set of test cases that are appropriate for a given software artefact. The software testing literature is replete with testing methods tailored to the various specification, design, and implementation methods used in software engineering. This chapter takes a novel inverted view. Instead of starting with the specific artefact at hand, we identify two general sets of coverage criteria - one based on graphs and the other based on predicates. We then ask two questions with respect to the specific artefact under test: (1) What graphs are suitable abstractions of the artefact for the purpose of testing? (2) What predicates should be extracted from this artefact for the purpose of testing? Combining the answers to these two questions with the standard graph-based and logic-based coverage criteria yields test requirements. The test engineer can then proceed to identify test cases that satisfy the various requirements. This chapter illustrate this technique in the context of testing software that is modelled by statebased specifications. We present a representative sample of graph-based and logic-based test coverage criteria. We extract appropriate graphs and predicates from state based specifications and apply the coverage criteria.