Achieving Effective Test Suites for Reactive Systems using Specification Mining and Test Suite Reduction Techniques

Abstract

Failures in reactive embedded systems are often unacceptable. Moreover, effective testing of such systems to detect potential critical failures is a difficult task. We present an automated black box test suite generation technique for reactive systems. The technique is based on dynamic mining of specifications, in form of a finite state machine (FSM), from initial runs. The set of test cases thus produced contain several redundant test cases, many of which are eliminated by a simple greedy test suite reduction algorithm to give the final test suite. The effectiveness of tests generated by our technique was evaluated using five case studies from the reactive embedded domain. Results indicate that a test suite generated by our technique is promising in terms of effectiveness and scalability. While the test suite reduction algorithm removes redundant test cases, the change in effectiveness of test suites due to this reduction is examined in the experimentation. We present our specification mining based test suite generation technique, the test suite reduction technique and results on industrial case studies.