On Studying the Effectiveness of Extended Finite State Machine Based Test Selection Criteria

A Master of Science thesis in Computer Engineering by Noshad Khan Jadoon entitled, "On Studying the Effectiveness of Extended Finite State Machine Based Test Selection Criteria," submitted in July 2015. Thesis advisor is Dr. Khaled El-Fakih. Soft and hard copy available.

Abstract

Automatic test derivation from formal specifications offers a rigorous discipline to functional conformance testing. In various application domains, such as communication protocols and other reactive systems, the specification can be represented in the form of an Extended Finite State Machine (EFSM). A number of methods can be used for deriving test suites from an EFSM specification. In practice, developing and applying these test suites to an implementation under test is time consuming and costly. Thus, it is desirable to determine high quality test suites in order to reduce the cost of testing. This research aims at determining and comparing the quality of various test suites. Using six realistic application examples, various known types of EFSM based test suites are derived and experiments are conducted to assess the fault coverage of these test suites. The assessment is carried out using EFSM mutants of these specifications, namely, EFSM mutants with single and double transfer faults, single assignment faults and single output parameter faults. The various types of considered test suites include single transfer fault, double transfer fault, all uses, single assignment fault, transition tour, state identifier, edge pair, prime path, prime path with side trip, and random test suites Ranking of the test suites, in terms of fault coverage and in terms of both coverage and test suite length, is established for each considered type of faults.