Percy Pari-Salas

Domain Specialisation and Applications of Model-Based Testing

Percy Antonio Pari-Salas — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:26:10 PDT

Software testing, one of the most important methods for quality assurance, has become too expensive and error prone for complex modern software systems. Test automation aims to reduce the costs of software testing and to improve its reliability. Despite advances in test automation, there are some domains for which automation seems to be difficult, for example, testing software to reveal the presence of security vulnerabilities, testing for conformance to security properties that traverse several functionalities of an application such as privacy policies, and testing asynchronous concurrent systems. Although there are research works that aim to solve the problems of test automation for these domains, there is still a gap between the practice and the state of the art. These works describe specific approaches that deal with particular problems, generally under restricted conditions. Nevertheless, individually, they have not made noticeable impact on the practice in test automation for these domains. Therefore, there is a need for an integrated framework that binds specific approaches together in order to provide more complete solutions. It is also important for this framework to show how current test automation efforts, tools and frameworks, can be reused. This thesis addresses this need by describing a general model-based testing framework and its specialisation for the testing domains of security vulnerabilities, privacy policies and asynchronous systems

Automated software testing of asynchronous systems

Percy Pari Salas et al. — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:26:09 PDT

Test automation faces challenges when applied to the testing of asynchronous systems. Automated testing tools need to deal with local non-determinism and, contrarily to most theoretical work, imperfect communication channels. We use event structures as the formalism to reason about the testing process. We differentiate between controllable and observable events but rely only on the sequence of controllable events to generate the test case. Observable events are used mainly as test oracle and to update the system state. We take existing testing tools and enhance them with practical mechanisms that allow them to perform asynchronous testing. These extensions are based on sound theory and have shown practical in dealing with real systems.

Industry academia collaboration: An experience report at a small university

Padmanabhan Krishnan et al. — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:20:47 PDT

This paper is a report on how sustainable and fruitful cooperation was achieved between a small university department and an industry partner. It outlines the range and type of activities that need to be undertaken over a longer than normal duration. It also describes the expectations from the industry partner for the cooperation to be successful.

Model-based testing and the UML testing profile

Padmanabhan Krishnan et al. — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:20:47 PDT

The UML Testing Profile (U2TP) provides a means of using UML for test case specification. In this work we show how the concepts of model-based testing can be mapped to U2TP at the conceptual level. We discuss structural as well as behavioural issues that allow certain aspects of model-based testing to be considered an instance of U2TP. This is achieved without insisting that model-based testing should use UML. We show how the process of using model-based testing including test case design, test generation and test execution using a tool can be captured as an instance of U2TP. The aim of this exercise is to show that model-based testing can be adopted as part of the U2TP framework, and that one does not need a different framework to adopt model-based testing in practice.

Testing privacy policies using models

Percy A. Pari-Salas et al. — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:01:01 PDT

Privacy policies are usually expressed at a high level using languages such as P3P, EPAL, which are independent of applications. To check if a system satisfies a privacy policy requires to link it with the behaviour of the system and its environment. We propose a framework which is based on models to support the automation of testing if a software system meets a policy. In our framework, policies and system's behaviour are expressed using formal models. These formal models are then combined and used to derive test cases. The main advantage of this approach is the automation of the testing process. We demonstrate its applicability via two examples.