Specification-Based Test Oracles
"Efficient Specification-Based Test Oracles for Critical Systems",
by T. Owen O'Malley, Debra J. Richardson and Laura K. Dillon
in Proceedings of 1996 California Software Symposium, April 1996
Abstract
Effective testing of critical systems has been hampered by the lack of
a cost-effective method for deciding the correctness of a program's
behavior under test. Using formal specifications to describe the
critical system properties and then checking test results against
these specifications overcomes these problems. If these test
oracles, which are mechanisms for determining whether a test
passes or fails, are efficient, they can be combined with automatic
test generation to cost-effectively automate the testing of large
numbers of testcases that more adequately cover the system
requirements and structure.
This paper presents a algorithm for automatically deriving efficient
test oracles from Graphical Interval Logic (GIL), which is a graphical
temporal logic that is easier for non-experts to understand than many
formal languages. To develop efficient test oracles from GIL, we
convert the specifications into automata that can be checked in time
linear in the length of the trace. Additionally, the automata can be
checked incrementally to identify the failure when it occurs, which
provides the opportunity to obtain useful information about the
erroneous state of the system. We have implemented a tool that
converts GIL specifications into automata based on the algorithms
presented in this paper.
from Debra J. Richardson
djr@ics.uci.edu
Department of Information and Computer Science,
University of California, Irvine CA 92717-3425