Using Change Impact Analysis to Select Tests for Extended Finite State Machines

Abstract

A formal approach to select tests for regression testing of changes performed in a system evolution step is proposed. Systems are modeled as extended finite state machines (EFSMs) supporting several commonly used data types including booleans, numbers, arrays, queues and records. Tests are described using a sequence of input and expected output messages with concrete parameter values. Changes add/delete/replace one or more EFSM transitions. Transitions potentially executed by a test are automatically identified from its description. A simple structural invariant for a test description based on these transitions is introduced. It is shown that for a test description satisfying the invariant it can be accurately determined if a given change affects the test. Affected tests are selected for regression testing of the change. Failure of a description to meet the invariant is analyzed to identify non-observable regions in the description, which are then further analyzed using other system transitions to identify affected tests. We also describe a novel approach based on substitutability of tests to reduce the size of a regression test suite without affecting coverage. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated by applying it to several examples. Our experiments based on a well-known cost model for regression testing show that the proposed approach is economical for selective re-testing in these examples.

Code-Change Impact Analysis Using Counterfactuals: Theory and Implementation

“…The work shown in [25] extends the approach of Guo et al in [11]. Their contribution, however, consists of addressing test-suite coverage issues in the face of change.…”

EFSM-Based Test Case Generation: Sequence, Data, and Oracle

“…In addition, EFSMs have been also used for other testing areas besides test case generation, such as test case prioritization [90], test case selection [91][92][93], test reduction [94,95] and dependence analysis [96][97][98], etc.…”

Reasoning about security in sensor networks

“…The work of Guo and Subramaniam is similar to ours in two aspects: (1) they formally represent change in a system; however, they use model checking, whereas we use theorem proving; (2) this approach prunes the global state space by using partial order reduction in order to infer the valid transitions when a change occurs; our approach deals with change at the ACM level, and the validity of the change is inferred by our logical calculus. In , Subramaniam et al improve on the approach shown in . The changes are still represented by adding and/or deleting transitions in a composite state machine.…”