Testing of concurrent programs based on message sequence charts

Abstract

Most prior work on specification-based testing of concurrent programs have postulated an equivalence relation between specifications and programs. However the equivalence relation, which requires a specification and a program to encompass the same set of synchronization sequences, is not well-suited for resting concurrent programs against partial and nondeterministic specifications. We present a new specification-based approach to testing concurrent programs against Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) with partial and nondeterministic semantics. New conformance relations, named behavioral conformance and nondeterminacy conformance, are defined and the details of the proposed testing methodology based on the conformance relations are given. The effectiveness of our testing approach is investigated using a telephone switching system example.