The Software Test Suite Generation Method Based On Model Compare

The score of the computer application is enlarging, and there are more and more computer applications used in key domain. Thus, higher software quality and reliability are required. As the most important technology to assure quality, software testing is more and more important in software development.With the development of relative technologies in software engineering, new requirements are emergying constantly to software testing; meanwhile, incur the improvement of software testing. The software engineering technologies affect software testing in three aspects. The development process models decide the process models of software testing. The software architectures affect the software testing levels. The software models, especially dynamic models determine the methods of test suite generation.The test suite generation is the key issue of software testing. It is important to select testing criteria in order to generate test suite more efficient. Partition testing is a kind of theory used to compare the efficiency of testing criterias. In addition, we use the probability of finding at least one fault to measure the effenciency. Thus, it cannot explain the adventage of some partition testing methods we used pervasively, such as equivalence testing and path-based testing methods. In fact, the adventage of the partition testing methods over random testing lies in that the partition testing methods can express the testers'anticipation of the errors in software under testing more exactly, and in that the partition testing methods partition the input domain into the subdomains of which the inputs are more relative. These make the distributeon and error-finding efficiency of the test suite very close to the ideal testing.Taking the adventage of partition testing into account, we present software testing method base on model compare. This method transforms the specification and the implementation into two models expressesd by the same model language, which we call base-model language. The model transformed from specification is specification-model. The other model transformed from implementation-model. We get the differentce between them, and then test suite is generated from this difference. The test suite generated by our method has much more test efficiency.With different base-model language, the testing method based on model compare is different.When using equivalence model as base-model, the specification-model should be created by tester manually, while the implementation-model can be created automatically——at first, we can get the path constrains and the calculation functions of each path of every member method through symbol execution technology and analyzing the originonal code of the software under testing, then we transform those path constrains and the calculate functions into an equivalence model.In the testing method using EFSM (Extended Finite State Machine) model as base-model, we create the specification-model by transforming the UML (the Unified Model Language) Statecharts into EFSM model. To create the implementation-model, we should get all path constrains and the calculate functions of methods from source code by symbol execution technology firstly, and then transform them into the set of states-transforming pairs, from which all possible state sets and the state transfer sets are generated.. These possible state sets and the state transfer sets is the original EFSM. Finally, optimizing the original EFSM to ensure the final implementation-model will be determinate and consistent.The experiment results show that software testing methods based on model compare are feasible, whether using equivalence model or EFSM model as base-model language. Moreover, these software testing methods are more efficient than other corresponding test suite generate methods.