Model-based replay testing for event-driven software

Abstract

Event-driven software systems are hard to thoroughly test because they possess a huge number of possible event sequences to test and also require significant manual effort and/or special hardware support during test case execution. In this paper we propose a novel testing approach, we call model-based replay testing that combines the advantages of model-based testing and an operating system (OS) level replay mechanism to overcome such difficulties of event-driven software testing. Specifically, we use a finite state machine (FSM) model and an n-switch set cover to automatically generate abstract test cases. We then introduce the use of OS-level replay mechanism in transforming abstract test cases into concrete test cases and executing them in an automated manner. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we also describe a case study on GUI software testing using a prototype implementation of an OS-level replay mechanism in Android software platform.