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Testing Systems of Concurrent Black-Boxes—An Automata-Theoretic and Decompositional Approach

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Formal Approaches to Software Testing (FATES 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3997))

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Abstract

The global testing problem studied in this paper is to seek a definite answer to whether a system of concurrent black-boxes has an observable behavior in a given finite (but could be huge) set Bad. We introduce a novel approach to solve the problem that does not require integration testing. Instead, in our approach, the global testing problem is reduced to testing individual black-boxes in the system one by one in some given order. Using an automata-theoretic approach, test sequences for each individual black-box are generated from the system’s description as well as the test results of black-boxes prior to this black-box in the given order. In contrast to the conventional compositional/modular verification/testing approaches, our approach is essentially decompositional. Also, our technique is complete, sound, and can be carried out automatically. Our experiment results show that the total number of tests needed to solve the global testing problem is substantially small even for an extremely large Bad.

The research was supported in part by NSF Grant CCF-0430531.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164, USA

    Gaoyan Xie & Zhe Dang

Authors
  1. Gaoyan Xie
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  2. Zhe Dang
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Wolfgang Grieskamp

  2. Ericsson Deutschland GmbH, 52134, Herzogenrath, Germany

    Carsten Weise

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Xie, G., Dang, Z. (2006). Testing Systems of Concurrent Black-Boxes—An Automata-Theoretic and Decompositional Approach. In: Grieskamp, W., Weise, C. (eds) Formal Approaches to Software Testing. FATES 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3997. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11759744_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11759744_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34454-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34455-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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