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Mutation Testing Applied to Estelle Specifications

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Abstract

Many researchers have pursued the establishment of a low-cost, effective testing and validation strategy at the program level as well as at the specification level. Mutation Testing is an error-based approach, originally introduced for program testing, that provides testers a systematic way to evaluate how good a given test set is. Some studies have also investigated its use to generate test sets. In this article, the application of Mutation Testing for validating Estelle specifications is proposed. A mutant operator set for Estelle—one of the crucial points for effectively applying Mutation Testing—is defined, addressing: the validation of the behavior of the modules, the communication among modules and the architecture of the specification. In this scope, these operators can be taken as a fault model. Considering this context, a strategy for validating Estelle-based specification is proposed and exemplified using the Alternating-bit protocol.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Informática, Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa (UEPG), USA

    Simone do Rocio Senger de Souza

  2. Departamento de Computação e Estati´stica, ICMC/USP, São Carlos, USA

    José Carlos Maldonado

  3. Departamento de Computação, Universidade Federal de São Carlos-UFSCar, USA

    Sandra Camargo Pinto Ferraz Fabbri & Wanderley Lopes de Souza

Authors
  1. Simone do Rocio Senger de Souza
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  2. José Carlos Maldonado
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  3. Sandra Camargo Pinto Ferraz Fabbri
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  4. Wanderley Lopes de Souza
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de Souza, S.d.R.S., Maldonado, J.C., Fabbri, S.C.P.F. et al. Mutation Testing Applied to Estelle Specifications. Software Quality Journal 8, 285–301 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008978021407

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008978021407