State Transition Testing Research Articles

State Transition Testing Approach for Ad hoc Networks using Ant Colony Optimization

Nowadays, telecommunication software organizations are challenged to provide high-quality software to customers within their estimated time and budget in order to stay competitive within the market. Because quality is a defining aspect of the product, it is essential for a project manager to stay alert throughout the project lifecycle. Quality has a direct bearing on customer satisfaction, and if a company produces high-quality products, satisfied customers will rank it highly in customer satisfaction surveys. Additionally, dissatisfied customers are more vocal in their criticisms. Therefore, testing is an important step to produce more reliable systems. In this paper we address two important aspects of software testing for ad hoc network protocols. The first one is by integrating a high-level testing approach based on state transition on top of a network simulator in order to fill a perceived gap in existing network simulators. The second one is reducing testing effort by eliminating redundant test cases, in order to effectively improve the result accuracy of existing network simulators. In this paper, we implemented an automated state transition testing approach for wireless network routing protocols, using an improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. The expected result is to provide maximum coverage in terms of states and transitions.

An Equivalent Division Method for Reducing Test Cases in State Transition Testing of MANET Protocols

A typical feature of MANETs is that network topology is dynamically changed by node movement. When we execute state transition testing for such protocols, first we draw the Finite State Machine (FSM) with respect to each number of neighbor nodes. Next, we create the state transition matrix from the FSMs. Then, we generate test cases from the state transition matrix. However, the state transition matrix is getting much large because the number of states and the number of transitions increase explosively with increase of the number of neighbor nodes. As a result, the number of test cases increases, too. In this paper, we propose a new method to reduce the number of test cases by using equivalent division method. In this method, we decide a representative input to each state, which is selected from equivalent inputs to the states. By using our proposed method, we can generate state transition matrix which is hard to affect increasing the number of neighbor nodes. As a consequence, the number of test cases can be reduced.