Test coverage criteria for agent interaction testing

  • Authors:

  • Tim Miller;Lin Padgham;John Thangarajah

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia;Department of Computer Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia;Department of Computer Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

  • Venue:
  • AOSE'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

By the very definition of complex systems, complex behaviour emerges from the interactions between the individual parts. This emergent behaviour may be difficult or impossible to predict by analysing the parts. As a result, systematic and thorough testing of the interactions of complex systems, including multi-agent systems, is an important part of the verification and validation process. This paper defines two sets of test coverage criteria for multi-agent interaction testing. The first uses only the protocol specification, while the second considers also the plans that generate and receive the messages in the protocol. We describe how an existing debugging agent can be used as a test oracle for assessing correctness of a test, and how the Petri Net representation of the debugging agent can be annotated to support test coverage measurements. This work both specifies, and shows how to measure, the degree of thoroughness of a set of test cases. It also provides a basis for the future specification of test case input, designed to provide good coverage.