Symbolic model based testing for component oriented systems

Abstract

In a component oriented approach, components are designed, developed and validated in order to be widely used. However one cannot always foresee which specific uses will be made of components depending on the system they will constitute. In this paper we propose an approach to test each component of a system by extracting accurate behaviours using information given by the system specification. System specifications are defined as input/output symbolic transition systems structured by a communication operator (synchronized product) and an encapsulation operator (hiding communication channels). By projecting symbolic execution of a system on its components, we derive unitary symbolic behaviours to be used as test purposes at the component level. In practice, those behaviours can be seen as typical behaviours of the component in the context of the system. We will illustrate on an example that those behaviours could not have been extracted by reasoning uniquely at the component level. © IFIP- International Federation for Information Processing 2007.