Symbolic Test Case Generation of Compositional Real-Time Systems Driven by Interruptions

Abstract

Real-time systems are composed of subsystems that may communicate by means of interruptions. An interruption is an event that requires preemption of a resource held by an executing subsystem. This subsystem may resume its execution from the point where it stopped when interruption handling finishes its execution. Testing systems composed of interruptions is hard since interruptions may happen at different points of execution. This fact demands the tester to apply a systematic procedure to specify and perform testing of the interruption behavior at specific points of interest. In this paper, we propose a symbolic approach to generating interruption test cases from real-time system models. We define an interruption operator for a timed model along with its properties. An empirical study illustrates its applicability to test application level interruptions on an Android system.