Strategies to Automatically Test Eiffel Programs Export

@mastersthesis{leitner04strategies, abstract = {Semi-automated software testing has become an increasingly popular and eective tool for raising the quality of software. Pre-, postconditions, and invariants describe the semantics of a feature (i.e., method or data member) and can help to decide whether a given test failed or passed [ARM03, Gre04, Ciu04]. Since the decision can be made without further knowledge of the input this opens up the possibility of a fully automated push button tester. Implementing such a system reveals both theoretical and practical challenges. A fully automated tester is likely to run the system under test into unrecoverable states and must at least be able to recover gracefully in order to continue testing. A master/slave mechanism has been implemented to automatically resume testing after a runtime crash. The tester must be able to satisfy the preconditions of the features under test in order to call them. Automatically satisfying preconditions in Eiel is a challenging problem, since the contract is in practice never complete. Even if it is, its expression language is both non-functional and undecidable. Using the very simple approach of (almost) random input data yields promising results, but features with strong preconditions are left untested. A more guided approach based on a planning system has been implemented for those cases. From Eiel source code a planning problem is generated with the goal being the precondition of the feature under test. A planner is used to generate a plan, which is then executed by an Eiel interpreter. If the goal can be reached, the precondition of the feature under test is satised and thus the feature can now be tested, otherwise information from the plan execution is used to augment the planning problem and the planner is asked for a new plan.}, author = {Leitner, Andreas}, citeulike-article-id = {4463945}, keywords = {automatic, automatic-testing, eiffel, softnet, testing}, posted-at = {2009-05-05 12:12:44}, priority = {5}, school = {Graz University of Technology}, title = {Strategies to Automatically Test Eiffel Programs}, year = {2004} }

TY - THES ID - leitner04strategies L3 - citeulike-article-id:4463945 N2 - Semi-automated software testing has become an increasingly popular and eective tool for raising the quality of software. Pre-, postconditions, and invariants describe the semantics of a feature (i.e., method or data member) and can help to decide whether a given test failed or passed [ARM03, Gre04, Ciu04]. Since the decision can be made without further knowledge of the input this opens up the possibility of a fully automated push button tester. Implementing such a system reveals both theoretical and practical challenges. A fully automated tester is likely to run the system under test into unrecoverable states and must at least be able to recover gracefully in order to continue testing. A master/slave mechanism has been implemented to automatically resume testing after a runtime crash. The tester must be able to satisfy the preconditions of the features under test in order to call them. Automatically satisfying preconditions in Eiel is a challenging problem, since the contract is in practice never complete. Even if it is, its expression language is both non-functional and undecidable. Using the very simple approach of (almost) random input data yields promising results, but features with strong preconditions are left untested. A more guided approach based on a planning system has been implemented for those cases. From Eiel source code a planning problem is generated with the goal being the precondition of the feature under test. A planner is used to generate a plan, which is then executed by an Eiel interpreter. If the goal can be reached, the precondition of the feature under test is satised and thus the feature can now be tested, otherwise information from the plan execution is used to augment the planning problem and the planner is asked for a new plan. TI - Strategies to Automatically Test Eiffel Programs PB - Graz University of Technology KW - automatic KW - automatic-testing KW - eiffel KW - softnet KW - testing AU - Leitner, Andreas PY - 2004/// ER -