Abstract
This paper concerns the problem of testing from a finite state machine (FSM) | $M$ | modelling a system that interacts with its environment at multiple physically distributed interfaces, called ports. We assume that the distributed test architecture is used: there is a local tester at each port, the tester at port | $p$ | only observes events at | $p$ | and the testers do not interact during testing. This paper formalizes the notion of an adaptive test strategy and what it means for an adaptive test strategy to be controllable. We provide algorithms to check whether a global strategy is controllable and to generate a controllable adaptive distinguishing sequence (ADS). We prove that controllable ADS existence is PSPACE-Hard and that the problem of deciding whether | $M$ | has a controllable ADS with length | $\ell $ | is NP-Hard . In practice, there is likely to be a polynomial upper bound on the length of ADS in which we are interested and for this case the decision problem is NP-Complete .
Highlights
Software testing is an important part of the software development process but is typically expensive, manual, and error-prone
We prove that the problem of deciding whether there is a controllable adaptive distinguishing sequence (ADS) that distinguishes the states of an finite state machine (FSM) M is NP-Hard but we leave decidability open
There has been interest in ADSs as they can be shorter, are computationally less expensive to produce, and there are FSMs that have ADSs but no preset distinguishing sequence (PDS). This has led to the development of many automated test case generation algorithms for FSMs that use ADSs
Summary
Software testing is an important part of the software development process but is typically expensive, manual, and error-prone. There are many techniques for generating test cases from an FSM (see, for example, [9,10,11,12,13]) and it is desirable to adapt these techniques for use in distributed testing. Most FSM test techniques use strategies (parts of test cases) to distinguish states of the FSM specification M and this motivates our interest in the problem of producing strategies that distinguish states of a multi-port FSM: techniques that produce such strategies have the potential to be used in test case generation methods for distributed testing. If we can produce ADSs from multi-port FSMs there is the potential to adapt current FSMbased test generation methods for use in distributed testing. 1. We discuss adaptive test cases, which we call test strategies, for FSM based testing and define both a global strategy
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