Exploring alternatives for transition verification

Abstract

When an implementation under test (IUT) is state-based, and its expected abstract behavior is given in terms of a finite state machine (FSM), a checking sequence generated from a specification FSM and applied to an IUT for testing can provide us with high-level confidence in the correct functional behavior of our implementation. One of the issues here is to generate efficient checking sequences in terms of their lengths. As a major characteristics, a checking sequence must contain all β-sequences for transition verification. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of reducing the lengths of checking sequences by making use of the invertible transitions in the specification FSM to increase the choice of β-sequences to be considered for checking sequence generation. We present a sufficient condition for adopting alternative β-sequences and illustrate typical ways of incorporating these alternative β-sequences into existing methods for checking sequence generation to reduce the lengths. Compared to the direct use of three existing methods, our experiments show that most of the time the saving gained by adopting alternative β-sequences falls in the range of 10–40%.