New Mutations for Evaluation of Specification and Implementation Levels of Adequacy in Testing of Statecharts Models
Mark Trakhtenbrot · 2007
In model-based development of embedded real-time systems, statecharts are widely used for formal specification of their behavior, providing a sound basis for test generation and for detection of faults early in the development process. The paper presents a variety of new mutations for adequacy evaluation of tests used in validation of statecharts-based models. These mutations focus on key features of statecharts used in modeling of embedded systems: hierarchy, orthogonality and time expressions. We distinguish between two levels of tests adequacy. In the first, test results are expected to strictly follow the statecharts semantics. The second one takes into account possible deviations from this semantics based on typical implementation oriented decisions, e.g. mapping of orthogonal components into separate tasks executed concurrently. The considered mutations address both types of adequacy. In particular, we consider interleaving enforcing mutations, for testing of alternatives to the canonical "maximum parallelism " execution of statecharts.