Property-oriented testing: An approach to focusing testing efforts on behaviours of interest

Abstract

The behaviours of reactive systems are characterized by events, conditions, actions, and information flows. Complex reactive systems further exhibit hierarchy and concurrency. Since there usually exist numerous behaviours in such systems, they can hardly receive both comprehensive and in-depth testing. This paper presents a property-oriented testing method for reactive systems. UML state machine is employed to model the system under test (SUT) and temporal logic is used to specify the property to be tested. Targeted test sequences are derived from the model according to the given property. Based on this method, a property-oriented testing tool is implemented. Experiment results indicate that testing efforts can be focused on behaviours of interest of the SUT and thus usually only a small portion of the total behaviours needs to be tested. This method suits well the occasions when the testers have to focus on only critical properties of the SUT in case limited project budget is available. After appropriate extensions, this method can also be applied to real-time systems and systems with parameterized events.