Safety-complete test suites

Abstract

In this paper, a novel safety-related variant of complete test suites for finite state machines is introduced. Under certain hypotheses which are similar to the ones used in the well-known W-Method and its improved versions, the new method guarantees to uncover every violation of safety properties from a certain well-defined class, while erroneous behaviour without safety relevance may remain undetected. While the method can be based on any of the known complete strategies for FSM testing, its most effective variant is based on the H-method, and this variant is presented in detail, denoted as the Safety-complete H-Method. It is guaranteed that application of the Safety-complete H-Method always results in less or equally many test cases than when applying the original H-Method. In well-defined situations that can be pre-determined from the reference model, the Safety-complete H-Method leads to a substantial reduction of test cases in comparison to the size of the analogous H test suites. We advocate this new test suite for situations, where exhaustive testing of the complete system is too expensive. In these cases, strong guarantees with respect to fault coverage should only be given for the errors representing safety violations, while it may be considered as acceptable if less critical errors remain undetected.