Model-based Automated Testing using a Record-Replay Mechanism

Abstract

Automated testing is increasingly becoming an essential part of software development as it significantly reduces laborious and time-consuming manual efforts. By automatically constructing and executing test cases with minimal manual work, automated testing promises high productivity, better coverage, and reduced cost. However, there still exist many obstacles that must be addressed to successfully incorporate automated testing into a real software development process. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automated test case creation and execution, called MoReT (Model-based Replay Testing), for event-driven systems. MoReT accepts a finite state machine model for a target system under test and generates a series of test cases based on the notion of Chow's n-switch coverage. Specifically, for a fixed n, MoReT finds an n-switch set cover that covers every sequence of consecutive transitions of length n+1 in a given state transition diagram. MoReT also allows us to automatically execute the generated test cases using a deterministic replay mechanism, called RT-Replayer, that can automatically generate and execute test cases, i.e., event sequences, during a test execution phase.