Automated SC-MCC Test Case Generation using Bounded Model Checking for Safety-Critical Applications

Abstract

Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) is an important criterion to test the safety-critical applications because it generates test cases in a linear manner from N+1 to 2N, where N is the number of Atomic Conditions in a given predicate. It is desirable in comparison to the exponential test cases produced for Multiple Condition Coverage (MCC), i.e., 2N. However, MCC with Short-Circuit (SC-MCC) is recommended since most of the safety-critical applications are built on the high-level languages that use Short-Circuit evaluation property. Our goal is to demonstrate that, despite the added overhead, the SC-MCC coverage-based test cases have a high error-detection probability compared to that of MC/DC. In this work, we have considered the CBMC tool to generate both the SC-MCC and MC/DC test cases for 80 RERS benchmark programs. Then, by optimizing the traditional Mutation Testing (using the GCOV tool), we computed the Mutation Score (%) to assess the quality of the generated test cases. As per the Mutation analysis, the proposed SC-MCC outperformed MC/DC for over 75% of the 80 RERS programs considered. Additionally, as per the Execution time analysis, the average total time taken to evaluate the MC/DC part of the proposed framework is 3065.98 s, whereas SC-MCC framework evaluation took 2167.70 s. This proves the efficiency of the proposed (SC-MCC) work over the traditional criterion (MC/DC) based work.