Testing and Assessment of Protocols and Systems Modeled as Extended Finite State Machines

Abstract

Developing and selecting an appropriate test suite is an important issue for testing implementations of protocols and other reactive software systems. Many methods are known for the derivation of test suites based on a specification given in the form of Extended Finite State Machine (EFSM). In practice, developing test suites and applying these test suites to an implementation under test is time consuming and costly. Thus, determining high quality test suites reduces the cost of software testing. To this end, in this thesis, we first assess and compare the coverage of test suites derived using known EFSM-Based test derivation criteria and test suites derived using the traditional Data-Flow and Control-Flow criteria. In addition, we assess and compare the coverage of these test suites with randomly generated test suites. Finally, we propose an EFSM-Based test derivation method that derives tests with the guaranteed coverage of transfer faults. Experiments comparing the fault detection capability of derived tests with those derived using the considered EFSM-Based, random, and the traditional Data-Flow and Control-Flow testing criteria are presented.