A Random Testing Approach Using Pushdown Automata

Pierre-Cyrille Heam (1, 2) , Catherine Masson (2)

1 FEMTO-ST - Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique, Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies (UMR 6174)
2 CASSIS - Combination of approaches to the security of infinite states systems

Developing efficient and automatic testing techniques is one of the major challenges facing the software validation community. Recent work by Denise and al. (in MBT'08 proceedings) shows how to draw traces uniformly at random in large systems modeled by finite automata for testing purposes. Since finite automata are strong abstractions of systems, many generated test cases following this approach may be un-concretizable, i.e., do not correspond to any concrete execution of the system under test. In this paper, we propose to tackle this problem by extending the approach to pushdown systems that can encode either a stack data structure or the call stack. The method is based on context-free grammar algorithms, and relies on combinatorial techniques to guarantee the uniformity of generated traces.

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Pierre-Cyrille Heam, Catherine Masson. A Random Testing Approach Using Pushdown Automata. 5th International Conference on Tests and Proofs - TAP 2011, Jun 2011, Zurich, Switzerland. pp.119-133, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-21768-5_10⟩. ⟨hal-00641750⟩