Current Technologies in Automatic Test Suites Generation and Verification of Complex Systems
Résumé
We have in our days more complex systems than ever in the so called information age. Everything is based on the ability to manage information, more information each moment. The success of this aim is based on the communication systems which are, in turn, more developed and, as a consequence, more complicated. In order to control this complexity explosion new architectures have been developed, architectures that hide details that are not relevant for a real system, implemented above all these. This alleviates the need to concentrate on all the general, non important aspects; for example the communication layer in a data exchanging architecture. It remains for the developer to concentrate on data exchange issues and not on the communication ones. Open systems are another example of this. Here multivendor components operate in a meaningful way in order to achieve a common goal. Testing and verifying such complex systems where many details are hidden becomes an important issue, especially if they are meant to co-operate. It is not a handy task to manually test and prove correctness requirements for a complex communicating system or software system. Proving that an implementation is correct is feasible only for very small entities. Testing systems, on the other side, requires them to be formally specified. The task of manually generating test sequences is acceptable also only for simple systems but not feasible for complex ones. This is due, here, to the large number of cases that should be considered. Therefore, a more practical approach is to test every manufacturer's system against a single test source, that corresponds to the system standard specification. This is generally known as conformance testing - the process of verifying that an implementation is in accordance with a particular standard