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Testing abstract behavioral specifications

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Abstract

We present a range of testing techniques for the Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language and apply them to an industrial case study. ABS is a formal modeling language for highly variable, concurrent, component-based systems. The nature of these systems makes them susceptible to the introduction of subtle bugs that are hard to detect in the presence of steady adaptation. While static analysis techniques are available for an abstract language such as ABS, testing is still indispensable and complements analytic methods. We focus on fully automated testing techniques including black-box and glass-box test generation as well as runtime assertion checking, which are shown to be effective in an industrial setting.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Andreas Kohn for proof reading this paper and anonymous referees for their useful suggestions and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SDL, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter Y. H. Wong

  2. Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, The Netherlands

    Richard Bubel & Reiner Hähnle

  3. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank S. de Boer & Stijn de Gouw

  4. DSIC, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Miguel Gómez-Zamalloa

  5. School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Karl Meinke

  6. Department of Computer Science, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Muddassar Azam Sindhu

Authors
  1. Peter Y. H. Wong
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  2. Richard Bubel
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  3. Frank S. de Boer
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  4. Miguel Gómez-Zamalloa
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  5. Stijn de Gouw
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  6. Reiner Hähnle
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  7. Karl Meinke
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  8. Muddassar Azam Sindhu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Y. H. Wong.

Additional information

This research is partially funded by the EU project FP7-231620 HATS: Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Models (http://www.hats-project.eu).

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Wong, P.Y.H., Bubel, R., de Boer, F.S. et al. Testing abstract behavioral specifications. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 17, 107–119 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-014-0301-x

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