4 Conformance Testing

Abstract

In this chapter we tackle the problem of conformance testing between finite state machines. The problem can be briefly described as follows [LY96]. Given a finite state machine M _S which acts as specification and for which we know its transition diagram, and another finite state machine M _I which is the alleged implementation and for which we can only observe its behavior, we want to test whether M _I correctly implements or conforms to M _S . The problem of conformance testing is also called fault detection, because we are interested in uncovering where M _I fails to implement M _S , or machine verification in the circuits and switching systems literature.