Symbolic Model Based Testing for Component Oriented Systems

Abstract

Abstract. In a component oriented approach, components are designed, developed and validated in order to be widely used. However one cannot always foresee which specific uses will be made of components depending on the system they will constitute. In this paper we propose an approach to test each component of a system by extracting accurate behaviours using information given by the system specification. System specifications are defined as input/output symbolic transition systems structured by a communication operator (synchronized product) and an encapsulation operator (hiding communication channels). By projecting symbolic execution of a system on its components, we derive unitary symbolic behaviours to be used as test purposes at the component level. In practice, those behaviours can be seen as typical behaviours of the component in the context of the system. We will illustrate on an example that those behaviours could not have been extracted by reasoning uniquely at the component level.

Testing of Component-Based Systems

“…Projection techniques [15] are defined by pruning from any global behavior p, all that does not concern the sub-system that we want to test. This will allows us to generate more relevant unit test cases to test individual components.…”

“…Compositional testing [15], [20], [22] is viewed as one of the most promising directions to bridge the gap between the increasing complexity of systems and actual testing method limits due to the reasons discussed above. Similarly to compositinality result in [20] establishing under certain hypothesis that the conformance testing relation ioco is compositional with respect to parallel composition and hiding, we have established a compositinality result in [3].…”

“…We will give in this paper, a new compositinality result that will take into account the behavior of global system in which components are plugged in. This last result is inspired from the approach proposed in [15], initially developed in the setting of IOST S (symbolic automaton). In [15], only projection is defined, but no compositinality result is given.…”

Test Purpose Concretization through Symbolic Action Refinement

“…We recall notations about IOSTS as given in [2], [6] and [1]. Let us first introduce the data part specified with a many sorted first-order equational logic.…”

“…We illustrate by means of an example how to adapt our testing framework ( [2], [1]) to take into account concretization through action refinement. In [2], test cases are extracted from so-called test purposes which are tree-like structures from the so-called symbolic execution tree of the IOSTS-model.…”