Test generation for sequential nets of abstract state machines

Abstract

Test generation techniques based on model checking suffer from the state space explosion problem. However, for a family of systems that can be easily decomposed in sub-systems, we devise a technique to cope with this problem. To model such systems, we introduce the notion of sequential net of Abstract State Machines (ASMs), which represents a system constituted by a set of ASMs such that only one ASM is active at every time. Given a net of ASMs, we first generate a test suite for every ASM in the net, then we combine the tests in order to obtain a test suite for the entire system. We prove that, under some assumptions, the technique preserves coverage of the entire system. We test our approach on a benchmark and we report a web application example for which we are able to generate complete test suites. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.