Extensional equivalence for transition systems
Acta Informatica
Software testing based on formal specifications: a theory and a tool
Software Engineering Journal
Art of Software Testing
A Testing Theory for LOTOS using Deadlock Detection
Proceedings of the IFIP WG6.1 Ninth International Symposium on Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification IX
Refusal Testing for Classes of Transition Systems with Inputs and Outputs
FORTE X / PSTV XVII '97 Proceedings of the IFIP TC6 WG6.1 Joint International Conference on Formal Description Techniques for Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols (FORTE X) and Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification (PSTV XVII)
TAPSOFT '95 Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference CAAP/FASE on Theory and Practice of Software Development
Using On-The-Fly Verification Techniques for the Generation of test Suites
CAV '96 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification
Testing Software Design Modeled by Finite-State Machines
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Modular Approach to the Specification and Validation of an Electrical Flight Control System
FME '01 Proceedings of the International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe on Formal Methods for Increasing Software Productivity
EDOC '05 Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference
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Although testing is the most widely used technique to control the quality of software systems, it is a topic that, until relatively recently, has received scant attention from the computer research community. Although some pioneering work was already done a considerable time ago [Cho78,GG83,How78,Mye79], the testing of software systems has never become a mainstream activity of scientific research. The reasons that are given to explain this situation usually include arguments to the effect that testing as a technique is inferior to verification - testing can show only the presence of errors, not their absence - and that we should therefore concentrate on developing theory and tools for the latter. It has also been frequently said that testing is by its very nature a non-formal activity, where formal methods and related tools are at best of little use. The first argument is incorrect in the sense that it gives an incomplete picture of the situation. Testing is inferior to verification if the verification model can be assumed to be correct and if its complexity can be handled correctly by the person and or tool involved in the verification task. If these conditions are not fulfilled, which is frequently the case, then testing is often the only available technique to increase the confidence in the correctness of a system. In this talk we will show that the second argument is flawed as well. It is based on the identification of testing with robustness testing, where it is precisely the objective to find out how the system behaves under unspecified circumstances. This excludes the important activity of conformance testing, which tries to test the extent to which system behaviour conforms to its specification. It is precisely in this area where formal methods and tools can help to derive tests systematically from specifications, which is a great improvement over laborious, error-prone and costly manual test derivation.