An Automated Approach to Inheritance and Polymorphic Testing using a VDM++ Specification

The use of formal methods is growing with the rapidly increasing applications of safety-critical systems in such fields as aviation, medicine, railways etc. The benefits of using formal methods are not limited to avoidance of specification errors and elimination of ambiguities only - a formal specif...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nadeem, A., Malik, Z.I., Lyu, M.R.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Application software
Automatic testing
Formal specification
Formal specifications
Medical tests
Object oriented modeling
Object-oriented testing
Rail transportation
Software safety
Software testing
Specification-based testing
State-space methods
System testing
Test-case generation
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Summary:The use of formal methods is growing with the rapidly increasing applications of safety-critical systems in such fields as aviation, medicine, railways etc. The benefits of using formal methods are not limited to avoidance of specification errors and elimination of ambiguities only - a formal specification also provides a sound basis for generating test suites. However, most of the work in this area has focused on unit testing only. In object-oriented paradigm, inheritance and polymorphism are powerful features, yet they present new challenges to the testers. In this paper, the authors present a novel approach to automated generation of test cases from a VDM++ specification. The authors base the testing technique on Offutt et al.'s fault model for subtype inheritance and polymorphic testing.
DOI:10.1109/INMIC.2006.358168