Automated generation of oracled test cases with regular expressions and combinatorial techniques

One of the main challenges of software testing research is the automated addition of oracles to the generated test cases: Whereas the automated generation of operation sequences (which is one of the essential components of test cases) is in practice a solved problem, the automated addition of the oracle (another indispensable element) is still an important problem and an open research question. This article proposes an approach to get executable test suites composed by complete test cases (i.e., they include the oracle). The core of the method is based on annotated regular expressions. The test generation process, which is supported by a tool, follows three steps: (1) creation of annotated regular expressions, where each regular expression describes a set of sequences of operations to be executed against the system under test; (2) expansion of the regular expressions to get sequences of operations, which still do not have parameter values; and (3) generation of the executable test cases with oracle. In this third step, each test case is generated with the suitable oracle, depending on the conditions specified in the regular expression

10421 Summary -- Model-Based Testing in Practice

Software testing is one of the most cost-intensive tasks in the modern software production process. Model-based testing is a light-weight formal method which enables the automatic derivation of tests from software models and their environment. Model-based testing (MBT) has matured as a rich research area in the last decade, with a significant body of research and applications. The academic community is well established with many conferences, workshops, and research projects. Tools for model-based testing have been developed both as research prototypes and as commercial or semi-commercial applications brought to users by midsize and enterprise-level companies, and applied in large scale projects. In the family of model-driven approaches, model-based testing can be seen as a success story in particular with respect to the degree of mechanical processing and automation that has been achieved, and the adoption in practice. The successful deployment of model-based testing in industrial settings can be seen in the telecommunication domain, chip cards, specific Windows components, and embedded systems in general. An interesting issue is under which circumstances we can expect these successes to carry over to other domains and families of systems as well (e.g., distributed systems; testing the cloud)