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Using formal methods to support testing
Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent
years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing
Reachability Analysis of Communicating Pushdown Systems
The reachability analysis of recursive programs that communicate
asynchronously over reliable FIFO channels calls for restrictions to ensure
decidability. Our first result characterizes communication topologies with a
decidable reachability problem restricted to eager runs (i.e., runs where
messages are either received immediately after being sent, or never received).
The problem is EXPTIME-complete in the decidable case. The second result is a
doubly exponential time algorithm for bounded context analysis in this setting,
together with a matching lower bound. Both results extend and improve previous
work from La Torre et al
Testing a system specified using Statecharts and Z
A hybrid specification language SZ, in which the dynamic behaviour of a system is described using Statecharts and the data and the data transformations are described using Z, has been developed for the specification of embedded systems. This paper describes an approach to testing from a deterministic sequential specification written in SZ. By considering the Z specifications of the operations, the extended finite state machine (EFSM) defined by the Statechart can be rewritten to produce an EFSM that has a number of properties that simplify test generation. Test generation algorithms are introduced and applied to an example. While this paper considers SZ specifications, the approaches described might be applied whenever the specification is an EFSM whose states and transitions are specified using a language similar to Z
Distinguishing sequences for partially specified FSMs
Distinguishing Sequences (DSs) are used inmany Finite State Machine (FSM) based test techniques. Although Partially Specified FSMs (PSFSMs) generalise FSMs, the computational complexity of constructing Adaptive and Preset DSs (ADSs/PDSs) for PSFSMs has not been addressed. This paper shows that it is possible to check the existence of an ADS in polynomial time but the corresponding problem for PDSs is PSPACE-complete. We also report on the results of experiments with benchmarks and over 8 * 106 PSFSMs. © 2014 Springer International Publishing
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