Model-based testing in industry: a case study with two MBT tools

Abstract

Traditional testing techniques may not always be suitable for adequate, thorough, and extensible testing of critical and complex software in a resource and time constrained software development environment. Model-based testing (MBT) is an evolving technique for generating test cases automatically from a behavioral model of a system under test. For a Siemens industrial project in the healthcare domain high quality, reliable and robust software is indispensable. Thus, we must ensure rigorous testing using a model based approach. We specify nine essential criteria to be satisfied to ensure the quality of the medical software with MBT. We have selected two recently launched MBT tools, namely Conformiq's Qtronic 2.0 and Microsoft's SpecExplorer 2010 V3.0, to see how far the criteria set for testing are achieved by these two tools. This paper reports on the evaluation of the tools and discusses the scope and objectives of future generation MBT tools.