Testing Systems of Concurrent Black-Boxes—An Automata-Theoretic and Decompositional Approach

Abstract

Abstract. The global testing problem studied in this paper is to seek a definite answer to whether a system of concurrent black-boxes has an observable behavior in a given finite (but could be huge) set Bad. We introduce a novel approach to solve the problem that does not require integration testing. Instead, in our approach, the global testing problem is reduced to testing individual black-boxes in the system one by one in some given order. Using an automata-theoretic approach, test sequences for each individual blackbox are generated from the system's description as well as the test results of black-boxes prior to this black-box in the given order. In contrast to the conventional compositional/modular verification/testing approaches, our approach is essentially decompositional. Also, our technique is complete, sound, and can be carried out automatically. Our experiment results show that the total number of tests needed to solve the global testing problem is substantially small even for an extremely large Bad.

Grey-Box Checking

“…We use three kinds of examples: an artificially pathological example simple n with n components, DAS (data acquisition system) with 4 components from [16] with every event observable, and finally, a system in which the memory is incremented and decremented by two processes through a COMA coherency protocol with unobservable actions (COMA was already used in [9], though modeled differently). The two different versions of COMA correspond to different initializations of the memory.…”

“…As a running example, we consider a data acquisition system (DAS) similar to the one used in [16]. It consists of three components Interface, Command, Sensor, which communicate as follows.…”

Decompositional Algorithms for Safety Verification and Testing of Aspect-Oriented Systems

“…It is reasonable to assume that black-box testing is expensive, in particular when one exhaustively runs every test from a huge (e.g., § © W¨ i n [6]) test set generated from ¤ § ! ¢ ¤ § ¦ ¦…”

“…Our algorithms are also related to our decompositional testing algorithms [6] for concurrent systems containing black-box components. In these latter algorithms which are inspired by the decompositional verification ideas by Giannakopoulou et.…”

“…[7], test sequences are generated and run on a concurrent component that are customized to its specific deployment environment. Since blackbox testing (instead of verification) is used in [6], unlike the framework in [7], the testing algorithms in [6] does not require a complete specification about a component to be incorporated into the concurrent system. On the other hand, we study decompositional testing algorithms for aspect-oriented systems in this paper instead of concurrent systems in [6].…”