Generic and Effective Specification of Structural Test Objectives

Sébastien Bardin (1) , Mickaël Delahaye (1) , Nikolai Kosmatov (2) , Michaël Marcozzi (1) , Virgile Prévosto (1)

1 LSL - Laboratoire Sûreté des Logiciels
2 LIST (CEA) - Laboratoire d'Intégration des Systèmes et des Technologies

While a wide range of different, sometimes heterogeneous test coverage criteria have been proposed, there exists no generic formalism to describe them, and available test automation tools usually support only a small subset of them. We introduce a unified specification language, called HTOL, providing a powerful generic mechanism to define test objectives , which permits encoding numerous existing criteria and supporting them in a unified way. HTOL comes with a formal semantics and can express complex requirements over several executions (using a novel notion of hyperlabels), as well as alternative requirements or requirements over a whole program execution. A novel classification of a large class of existing criteria is proposed. Finally, a coverage measurement tool for HTOL objectives has been implemented. Initial experiments suggest that the proposed approach is both efficient and practical.

Keywords: specification language; white-box software testing; code coverage; test requirements

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Software Engineering [cs.SE]

Sébastien Bardin, Mickaël Delahaye, Nikolai Kosmatov, Michaël Marcozzi, Virgile Prévosto. Generic and Effective Specification of Structural Test Objectives. 2016. ⟨cea-01357487⟩