Chaining Test Cases for Reactive System Testing (extended version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for generating minimal test case chains for reactive systems, reducing testing time by covering multiple goals in a single execution, especially useful in real-world environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to discover and minimize test case chains for safety property goals in reactive systems, improving testing efficiency.

Findings

Successfully generated minimal test chains for C code from Simulink models.

Outperformed existing test suite generators in experimental evaluations.

Reduced overall testing time by consolidating multiple goals into single chains.

Abstract

Testing of synchronous reactive systems is challenging because long input sequences are often needed to drive them into a state at which a desired feature can be tested. This is particularly problematic in on-target testing, where a system is tested in its real-life application environment and the time required for resetting is high. This paper presents an approach to discovering a test case chain---a single software execution that covers a group of test goals and minimises overall test execution time. Our technique targets the scenario in which test goals for the requirements are given as safety properties. We give conditions for the existence and minimality of a single test case chain and minimise the number of test chains if a single test chain is infeasible. We report experimental results with a prototype tool for C code generated from Simulink models and compare it to state-of-the-art test suite generators.