13th GI/ITG Conference on Measurement, Modeling, and Evaluation of Computer and Communication Systems
Systematic testing of software plays an important role in the quest for improved software quality. Testing, however, turns out to be an error-prone, expensive, and time-consuming process. Model based testing aims at improving this situation. In model based testing there is a formal description, or model, of the system under test. This allows test automation that goes well beyond the mere automatic execution of manually crafted test cases: it allows for the algorithmic generation of large amounts of test cases, including test oracles, completely automatically from the model of required behaviour. If this model is valid, i.e. expresses precisely what the system under test should do, then all these tests are also provably valid.
In this presentation we will report about the state-of-the-art, perspectives, and challenges of automatic, model based testing in general, and of model based testing for transition systems in particular. The "ioco testing theory" for labelled transition systems, which indeed produces provably sound test cases, is discussed. The model based test tool TorX implementing this theory will be shown, and some past and ongoing projects where TorX has been used in academic as well as in industrial applications, are reported.
Jan Tretmans is associate professor in the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He is working in the areas of software testing, and the use of formal methods in software engineering; in particular, he likes to combine these two topics: testing based on formal specifications, or model based testing. In this field he has several publications, and he has given numerous presentations at scientific conferences as well as for industrial audiences.
Jan Tretmans holds a degree in Electrotechnical Engineering and a PhD. in Computer Science, both from the University of Twente in The Netherlands. He spent some time as a post-doctoral researcher in Norway, Greece and Germany, and for a couple of years he was in involved in the academic-industrial transfer of formal methods technology. Before joining the University of Nijmegen he was in the Formal Methods and Tools research group at the University of Twente. Currently he is involved in the Dutch research projects Atomyste, Stress, and Tangram, and in the EU project Tarot, which all address some aspect of the theory, tools and applications of model based testing based on formal methods, and in which industrial-academic collaboration plays an important role.