Deriving Test Suites with the Guaranteed Fault Coverage for Extended Finite State Machines

Abstract

Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) are widely used when deriving tests for checking functional requirements for software implementations. However, the fault coverage of tests covering appropriate paths, variables, etc. of the specification EFSM, remains rather obscure and such tests do not detect many functional faults in EFSM implementations. In this paper, an approach is proposed for deriving complete tests with respect to functional faults of a proper Java EFSM implementation. First, an initial test suite derived against the specification EFSM is checked with respect to faults generated by a µJava tool. Since the EFSM software implementation is template based, each undetected fault can be easily mapped into a mutant EFSM of the specification machine. Thus, a distinguishing sequence is derived for two Finite State Machines modeling two EFSMs instead of deriving such a sequence for two programs. If the corresponding FSMs are too complex or cannot be completely derived, a test suite can be incomplete. However, the performed experiments clearly show that a test suite extended by such distinguishing sequences detects much more functional faults in software implementations of a system whose behaviour is described by the given EFSM.

Keywords

• mutation testing
• extended finite state machine (efsm)
• finite automata
• µjava