Conditional-event usage testing
Denise M. Woit · Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research · 1998
In limited applications, operational profile testing has been shown to increase productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce cost and time to market [4, 1, 5]. Unfortunately, underlying assumptions of this method make it generally inapplicable to the large class of software for which dependencies exist among the software's operations [2]. We propose conditional-event usage testing (CEUT), which will retain the benefits of traditional operational profile testing but which is not limited in the class of systems to which it applies. In CEUT, the expected usage of the software is modeled in such a way as to allow specification of conditions upon expected input event sequences. The model is used to generate test cases which will exercise the software in a fashion typical of actual operation. For systems with dependencies among operations, using CEUT resulted in test sequences that were typical of those experienced in operation, and allowed the benefits of operational profile-type testing to be realized on such systems.