A Petri Net based Approach for Establishing Necessary Software Design and Testing Requirements

In this paper, a Petri net based approach for establishing the minimal design and testing requirements for software systems is presented. It is based on a technique called the minimal transition cover set (MTCS), developed from minimal transition invariants of the corresponding Petri net model [3]. The MTCS is based on identifying the important decisions being made within the design model. Depending on the design requirements, a designer may choose to expand lower level procedures during an analysis, and thereby, generate information about other "lower-level" decisions selectively within the design which are to be made available to other sub-systems. A further modification of the MTCS approach is used to derive the decision nodes that are "buried" within the design model. Again, a software test engineer may either choose to selective build test cases for individual modules and incorporate them as stubs in a higher level module, or integrate these modules within higher level modules bef..