On Testing against Partial Non-observable Specifications

Abstract

As the complexity of communication systems increases, new techniques and strategies should be developed for testing and verification of the system components. In this paper, we focus on testing software components that implement communication protocols at various levels. Such implementations can be considered as reactive systems and we discuss how Finite State Machines (FSMs) might be used when deriving high quality tests and which properties can be held for corresponding FSMs when increasing/decreasing an abstraction level for the protocol specification. At the high abstraction level, the specification machine can be partial and non-observable, and we propose a test derivation strategy against such specifications. Furthermore, we turn to debugging techniques and discuss how an implementation bug can be located when the specification is partial and non-observable.