Test path selection based on effective domains

Abstract

In this paper a method is proposed to produce test paths that check both data flow and control flow for a protocol specified in the extended finite state machine (EFSM) model. The method first identifies a set of paths from a given specification to cover a data flow selection criterion, then it appends state check sequences to some transitions in this set of paths for checking control flow. The criterion that our method employs for selecting these transitions is called effective domain for testing. Effective domain for testing is used to evaluate how effective a transition can be tested in a given path in terms of the range of values that the variables in this transition can have. Since each transition can appear in several paths, our method is to append state check sequences to its occurrences that have distinct effective domains. In addition, our method will compute the path domain for each path and make some inexecutable paths executable.<>