MC/DC COVERAGE FOR REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATIONS

In the early 1990s, the Modi ed Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) criterion was suggested as a structural white-box testing approach, but it can also be used for blackbox speci cation-based testing. Practical application of MC/DC for speci cationbased testing has its own unique features and is sometimes quite di erent from codebased applications. However, MC/DC as a black-box approach has not been studied su ciently, and thus, the application of MC/DC for speci cation coverage was the main research problem considered in this thesis. The goal of this study was to analyze MC/DC as a black-box technique, investigate factors that distinguish black- and white-box applications of this approach, and provide proper de nitions and rules with a prototype implementation to evaluate the MC/DC level during black-box testing

Compositional Generation of MC/DC Integration Test Suites

We present a method for automatically generating tests for reactive systems specified by concurrently executing extended finite state machines. The generated test suites satisfy the modified condition/decision coverage criterion at unit and integration levels. The generation of MC/DC suites for eager first-order functional programs is subsumed. An industrial chip card case study illustrates the approach.

Validation and Verification of Safety-Critical Systems in Avionics

This research addresses the issues of safety-critical systems verification and validation. Safety-critical systems such as avionics systems are complex embedded systems. They are composed of several hardware and software components whose integration requires verification and testing in compliance with the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics standards and their supplements (RTCA DO-178C). Avionics software requires certification before its deployment into an aircraft system, and testing is mandatory for certification. Until now, the avionics industry has relied on expensive manual testing. The industry is searching for better (quicker and less costly) solutions. This research investigates formal verification and automatic test case generation approaches to enhance the quality of avionics software systems, ensure their conformity to the standard, and to provide artifacts that support their certification. The contributions of this thesis are in model-based automatic test case generations approaches that satisfy MC/DC criterion, and bidirectional requirement traceability between low-level requirements (LLRs) and test cases. In the first contribution, we integrate model-based verification of properties and automatic test case generation in a single framework. The system is modeled as an extended finite state machine model (EFSM) that supports both the verification of properties and automatic test case generation. The EFSM models the control and dataflow aspects of the system. For verification, we model the system and some properties and ensure that properties are correctly propagated to the implementation via mandatory testing. For testing, we extended an existing test case generation approach with MC/DC criterion to satisfy RTCA DO-178C requirements. Both local test cases for each component and global test cases for their integration are generated. The second contribution is a model checking-based approach for automatic test case generation. In the third contribution, we developed an EFSM-based approach that uses constraints solving to handle test case feasibility and addresses bidirectional requirements traceability between LLRs and test cases. Traceability elements are determined at a low-level of granularity, and then identified, linked to their source artifact, created, stored, and retrieved for several purposes. Requirements’ traceability has been extensively studied but not at the proposed low-level of granularity