A systematic literature review on process model testing: Approaches, challenges, and research directions

Testing is a key concern when developing process-oriented solutions as it supports modeling experts who have to deal with increasingly complex models and scenarios such as cross-organizational processes. However, the complexity of the research landscape and the diverse set of approaches and goals impedes the analysis and advancement of research and the identification of promising research areas, challenges, and research directions. Hence, a systematic literature review is conducted to identify interesting areas for future research and to provide an overview of existing work. Over 6300 potentially matching publications were determined during the search (literature databases, selected conferences\journals, and snowballing). Finally, 153 publications from 2002 to 2013 were selected, analyzed, and classified. It was found that the software engineering domain has influenced process model testing approaches (e.g., regarding terminology and concepts), but recent publications are presenting independent approaches. Additionally, historical data sources are not exploited to their full potential and current testing related publications frequently contain evaluations of relatively weak quality. Overall, the publication landscape is unevenly distributed so that over 31 publications concentrate on test-case generation but only 4 publications conduct performance test. Hence, the full potential of such insufficiently covered testing areas is not exploited. This systematic review provides a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary topic of process model testing. Several open research questions are identified, for example, how to apply testing to cross-organizational or legacy processes and how to adequately include users into the testing methods

On Testing 1-Safe Petri Nets

Abstract—Formal models are often considered for software systems specification, and are helpful for verifying that certain properties are respected, or for automatically generating the implementation code corresponding to the model, or again for conformance testing, for the automatic generation of test cases to check an implementation against the formal specification. Variations of Finite State Machine (FSM) models have been mostly used for conformance testing, while the otherwise very popular formal model of Petri Nets is seldom mentioned in this context. In this paper, we look at the question of conformance testing when the model is provided in the form of a 1-safe Petri Net. We provide a general framework for conformance testing, and give algorithms for deriving test cases under different assumptions: Besides the adaptation of methods originally developed for FSMs which lead to exponentially long test sequences, we have identified cases for which polynomial testing algorithms for free-choice Petri nets can be provided. These results are significant when modeling concurrent systems, as exemplified by workflow modeling. Conformance testing, fault model, 1-safe Petri nets, freechoice Petri nets, automatic test generatio