A Formal Approach to Testing Programs in Practice

Shaoying Liu1, Wuwei Shen2 and Shin Nakajima3

  1. Department of Computer Science, Hosei University
    Japan
    sliu@hosei.ac.jp
  2. Department of Computer Science, Western Michigan University
    USA
    wshen@wmich.edu
  3. NII
    Japan
    nkjm@nii.ac.jp

Abstract

A program required to be tested in practice often has no available source code for some reason and how to adequately test such a program is still an open problem. In this paper, we describe a formal specification-based testing approach to tackle this challenge. The principal idea is first to formalize the informal requirements into formal operation specifications that take the interface scenarios of the program into account, and then utilize the specifications for test case generation and test result analysis. An example and case study of applying the approach to an IC card system is presented to illustrate its usage and analyze its performance.

Key words

Specification-based testing, Formal specification, Black-box testing

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS120301050L

Publication information

Volume 9, Issue 4 (December 2012)
Special Issue on Recent Advances in Systems and Informatics
Year of Publication: 2012
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

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How to cite

Liu, S., Shen, W., Nakajima, S.: A Formal Approach to Testing Programs in Practice. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1469-1492. (2012), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS120301050L