Construction technique of large operational profiles for statistical software testing

Abstract

This paper shows a novel construction technique of large operational profiles in order to effectively apply statistical software testing to recent projects in which large software is developed in a short timeframe. In this technique, test engineers construct small operational profiles that represent usage characteristics of components of SUT (software under test), and a large operational profile that represents usage characteristics of the whole of SUT is automatically generated from the small operational profiles so as to satisfy behavioral constraints among the components of the SUT. The large operational profile generated by this technique is called a product operational profile, and is used to generate test cases in statistical testing. The key idea of this technique is that an operational profile of the whole of SUT is too large to be constructed manually, but operational profiles of the components of SUT are small and therefore are easy to be constructed. We propose the basic notions of the product operational profile, the behavioral constraints and a generation algorithm, and then evaluate their effectiveness by using an example of software. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.