Handling redundant and additional states in protocol testing
Alexandre Petrenko, Teruo Higashino, T. Kaji · 1996
This paper addresses the problem of conformance testing of protocols modeled by FSMs with redundant states. Redundant states appear in an FSM which may be nonminimal or nonconnected. The existing test derivation methods usually are not directly applicable to these machines. In this paper, we show that they can be adjusted to cover this class of FSMs and that the traditional assumption on the minimality of machines is not necessary. Another problem with redundant states is that they can cause the appearance of additional states in protocol implementations whose guaranteed detection requires tests of an exponential length. This paper proposes techniques for deriving tests for FSMs with redundant or additional states such that a high fault coverage is achieved while maintaining an acceptable test suite length. The effectiveness of the proposed methods has been evaluated in an experimental way using a benchmark protocol.