Automated test generation for synchronous controllers
Mouna Tka Mnad, Christophe Deleuze, Ioannis Parissis, Jackie Launay, J.B. Gning · 2016
This paper addresses the problem of automating the production of test sequences for a particular class of Programmable Logic Controllers (em4) produced by InnoVista Sensors. The latter are synchronous systems and are programmed by means of an ad hoc integrated development environment (IDE). People using and programming such controllers are not necessarily experienced programmers, so the development of software applications must be simple and intuitive. This should also be the case for testing. Until now, the design of test input sequences is informal and testing is interactively performed by programmers using a simulator included in the IDE. Based on previous investigations on testing of synchronous programs, we propose a method to automatically generate test inputs sequences for synchronous controllers. In a previous paper we presented a new test specification language, called SPTL (Synchronous Programs Testing Language) that makes possible to simply express test scenarios. In this paper, we present a prototype tool that we designed and developed, named "Testium", that translates a SPTL program into a set of constraints exploited by a Prolog solver to randomly choose test inputs.