On statistical structural testing of synchronous data flow programs

Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of testing programs written in the synchronous data flow language LUSTRE. We define a mixed strategy which combines statistical testing and deterministic extremal values testing. Statistical testing involves exercising a program with random inputs, the input distribution and the number of test data being determined according to test criteria. Three criteria based on the finite state automaton produced by the LUSTRE compiler are studied, the feasibility of the method for designing test sets according to them being exemplified on a real-case study. Then, mutation analysis (here, specific to LUSTRE) is used to assess the efficiency of the test sets. The results allow us (i) to define the most cost-effective criterion for designing efficient statistical test sets of reasonable size, and (ii) to show the high fault revealing power of the corresponding mixed strategy, killing the whole set of 310 mutants involved in the experiments.