A study for extended regular expression-based testing
Pan Liu, Jun Ai, Zhenning “Jimmy” Xu · 2017
Software testing has become an essential activity to guarantee software quality. To reduce the overall cost of software testing, model-based testing has been widely studied in the past two decades and Finite State Machine (FSM) is used to build the model of software behaviors. However, due to the inadequacy of the modeling ability of FSM, FSM-based testing cannot be taken as a test oracle to solve all issues in software testing. To improve the modeling capability of the model, a few researchers have proposed using Extended Regular Expressions (ERE) to model software behaviors. This paper reviews the method of the ERE-based testing and presents six modeling rules to convert program codes to the ERE model. Then, a case is adopted to illustrate the process of generating executable paths from the ERE model and the method of designing test cases by those paths. Compared with the traditional graphic traversal method of constructing executable paths from the program, ERE not only has robust modeling capability to describe more types of software behaviors than FSM, but also can be used to construct effective executable paths to detect program errors.