Paul Ammann and Paul E. Black, Abstracting Formal Specifications to Generate Software Tests via Model Checking, Proceedings of the 18th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), St. Louis, Missouri (October 1999), IEEE, volume 2, section 10.A.6, pages 1-10. Extended version is NIST-IR 6405.

Abstract:

    A recent method combines model checkers with specification-based mutation analysis to generate test cases from formal software specifications. However high-level software specifications usually must be reduced to make analysis with a model checker feasible.

    We propose a new reduction, parts of which can be applied mechanically, to soundly reduce some large, even infinite, state machines to manageable pieces. Our work differs from other work in that we use the reduction for generating test sets, as opposed to the typical goal of analyzing for properties. Consequently, we have different criteria, and we prove a different soundness rule. Informally the rule is that counterexamples from the model checker are test cases for the original specification. The reduction changes the state machine and temporal logic constraints in the model checking specification to avoid generating unsound test cases. We give an example of the reduction and test generation.

Get the extended version, NIST-IR 6405, in DVI (94k), Postscript (265k), or PDF (274k).

This page's URL is /~black/Papers/finitfocus.html

Updated Wed Jul 10 10:29:40 2002

Go to Black's papers or NIST home page.