A new formal test method for networked software integration testing

Abstract

This paper considers the integration testing for networked software that is built by assembling several distributed components in an interoperable manner. Using the traditional single automata-based test approaches, we suffer from the state combinatorial explosion problem. Moreover, several generated test cases may not be executable. This paper proposed a test method based on the automata net which is the extension of communication automata. The state/transition path (S/T-Path) is defined to describe the execution of the software under test. The test cases are constructed through combining the atomic S/T-Paths and all executable. The test cases are calculated from the local transition structures and the interaction procedure between components, so the state combinatorial explosion problem will not be encountered. The generation of test cases for certain software and the benefits for the problems are discussed. Results show that our method has better properties. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.