An enhanced test case selection approach for model-based testing: an industrial case study

  • Authors:

  • Hadi Hemmati;Lionel Briand;Andrea Arcuri;Shaukat Ali

  • Affiliations:

  • Simula Research Laboratory and University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway;Simula Research Laboratory and University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway;Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway;Simula Research Laboratory and University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In recent years, Model-Based Testing (MBT) has attracted an increasingly wide interest from industry and academia. MBT allows automatic generation of a large and comprehensive set of test cases from system models (e.g., state machines), which leads to the systematic testing of the system. However, even when using simple test strategies, applying MBT in large industrial systems often leads to generating large sets of test cases that cannot possibly be executed within time and cost constraints. In this situation, test case selection techniques are employed to select a subset from the entire test suite such that the selected subset conforms to available resources while maximizing fault detection. In this paper, we propose a new similarity-based selection technique for state machine-based test case selection, which includes a new similarity function using triggers and guards on transitions of state machines and a genetic algorithm-based selection algorithm. Applying this technique on an industrial case study, we show that our proposed approach is more effective in detecting real faults than existing alternatives. We also assess the overall benefits of model-based test case selection in our case study by comparing the fault detection rate of the selected subset with the maximum possible fault detection rate of the original test suite.