Tool support for statistical testing of software components

We describe the "STSC" prototype tool that supports the statistical testing of software components. The tool supports a wide range of operational profiles and test oracles for test case generation and output evaluation. The tool also generates appropriate values for different types of input parameters of operations. STSC automatically generates a test driver from an operational profile. This test driver invokes a test oracle that is implemented as a behaviour-checking version of the implementation. To evaluate the flexibility and usability of the tool, it has been applied to several case studies using different types of operational profiles and test oracles

Systematic Operational Profile Development for Software Components

An operational profile is a quantification of the expected use of a system. Determining an operational profile for software is a crucial and difficult part of software reliability assessment in general and it can be even more difficult for software components. This paper presents a systematic method for deriving an operational profile for software components. The method uses both actual usage data and intended usage assumptions to derive a usage structure, usage distribution and characteristics of parameters (including relationships between parameters). A usage structure represents the flow and interaction of operation calls. Statecharts are used to model the usage structures. A usage distribution represents probabilities of the operations. The method is illustrated on two Java classes but can be applied to any software component that is accessed through an Application Program Interface (API)

A Passive Test Oracle Using a Component's API

A test oracle is a mechanism that is used during testing to determine whether a software component behaves correctly or not. The test oracle problem is widely acknowledged in the software testing literature and many methods for test oracle development have been proposed. Most of these methods use specifications or other resources to develop test oracles. A passive test oracle checks the behaviour of the component, but does not reproduce this behaviour. In this paper, we present a technique that develops passive test oracles for components using their APIs. This simple technique can be applied to any software component that is accessed through an API. In an initial experiment, we found that test oracles developed this way were more effective at finding faults with a relatively small number of test cases than test oracles developed from a formal specification and developed as a parallel implementation