Petri net based test case generation for evolved specification

Abstract

Model-based testing can use a model to test a concrete program’s implementation. When the model is changed due to the evolution of the specification, it is important to maintain the test suites up to date, such that it can be used for regression testing. A complete regeneration of the whole test suite from the new model, although inefficient, is still frequently used in practice. To address this problem effectively, we propose a test case reusability analysis technique to identify reusable test cases of the original test suite based on graph analysis, such that we can generate new test cases to cover only the change-related parts of the new model. The Market Information System (MIS) is employed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Our experimental results show that the use of our method saves about 31.5% test case generation cost.