Property-oriented testing of real-time systems

Abstract

Although statecharts has gained widespread use as a formalism for modeling reactive real-time systems, testing these systems still confronts some difficulties, of which a major one is the existence of numerous and complex system behaviors. It is extremely difficult to conduct comprehensive and in-depth testing of such real-time systems. This paper presents an approach to property-oriented real-time testing. Necessary real-time extensions are proposed such that the time-enriched statecharts can describe nontrivial timing constraints. The properties to be tested are characterized by a restricted real-time logic. Then the targeted test sequences are derived from the real-time models according to the user-specified properties. Using this approach, testing efforts can be focused on particular properties of the real-time systems and usually only a small portion of the total behaviors needs to be tested.