Comments on “a reduced test suite for protocol conformance testing”

Abstract

A previous ACM TOSEM article of Ph. Bernhard (“A Reduced Test Suite of Protocol Conformance Testing,” ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1994, pages 201-220) describes three new versions of the so-called W-method for solving the protocol-testing problem, i.e., solving the Mealy machine equivalence problem. The author claims that these versions all have the same fault detection capability as the original W-method. In this correspondence we prove that the results of that article are incorrect.