Compositional Testing of Communication Systems

Abstract

Abstract. Today, test methods for communication protocols assume, among other things, that the protocol design is specified as a single, monolithic finite state machine (FSM). From this specification, test suites that are capable of detecting output and/or transfer faults in the protocol implementation are derived. Limited applicability ofthese methods is mainly because oftheir specific assumptions, and due to the size ofthe derived test suite and the resulting test effort for realistic protocols. In this work, the compositional test method ( C-method), which exploits the a:vailable structure of a communication protocol, is proposed. The C-method first tests each protocol component separately for output and/or transfer faults, using one ofthe traditional test methods, then checks for composability, and finally tests the composite system for composition faults. To check for composability and to derive the test suite for the detection of composition faults, it is not required to construct the global state machine. Instead, all information is derived from the component state machines, which avoids a potential state explosion and lengthy test cases. Furthermore, the test suite checks for composition faults only. This substantially reduces the size ofthe test suite and thus the overall test effort.

Symbolic Model Based Testing for Component Oriented Systems

“…The definition of dedicated methodologies for component based systems should clearly rely on the targeted fault models. We plan to study fault models that mainly deal with communication mechanisms as in [5]. For such fault models, a testing methodology would probably preconize to construct test purposes for behaviors involving a lot of internal communication synchronizations.…”

“…In the first approach, the global system is tested according to behaviors involving communication mechanisms, focusing on cases for which those mechanisms are not observable (i.e internal communications). Obviously, this approach is used when the targeted fault model mainly deals with communication mechanisms as in [9,5,1]. In the second approach, the global system is tested by selecting behaviors of basic components that are typically activated in the system.…”

A Test Suite Generation Method for Component Interaction Testing

“…The approach of integration testing is proposed in [10] based on UML, first, According to the model, the interaction activities of different components are merged and then the test cases are derived from the composed model. Gotzhein and Khendek [11] propose a compositional test method, which test the concurrent component composition without constructing the global state machines.…”

Testing Component-Based Real Time Systems

“…Selection of abstract tests from the zone-graph according to a coverage criterion. For that, we adapt the untimed initial tour coverage tree of [8] for zone-graph. A path is an initial tour if it starts and ends in the initial location.An Initial tour coverage tree is a tree containing all minimal initial tours such that every edge is covered at least once and no tour is contained as a prefix or suffix of another tour.…”