Program Testing Using High-Level Property-Driven Models

Testing is a crucial part of the software development life cycle that necessitates adequate techniques and tools. On the one hand, unit testing techniques are particularly easy and lightweight to use but are restricted to testing the external behaviour of a program. On the other hand, testing techniques that use property-driven models of the software are able to test behavioural properties of the entire execution of a program. However, these models are often specified in terms of low-level execution events of the program. In this paper, we present the lightweight propertydriven testing platform called BEHAVE, where tests are written as property-driven behavioural models over highlevel run-time events. We validate our approach by testing behavioural properties related to the automatic memory management in the interpreter of the Pico programming language. 1