Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Publication
Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
The purpose of this paper is to present an experiment with formal methods for the black-box testing of reusable abstract data types (ADTs). We propose to test a family of software components by re-engineering a formal specification from an existing Ada implementation, using algebraic specifications. From this well-defined basis, we generate test sets automatically, by constructing an exhaustive set of formulae that prove the property preservations of a program with respect to its specifications, and by reducing this set to a finite size by applying reduction hypotheses. Once the selection of a finite test set has been performed, we show how to build the oracle, the decision procedure for the success or the failure of a test set. Finally, we discuss the advantages of test sets generated from the formal specification over those defined by a programmer, based on his intuitive understanding of the behavior of the ADT.