Conditional-event usage testing

ABSTRACT

In limited applications, operational profile testing has been shown to increase productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce cost and time to market [4, 1, 5]. Unfortunately, underlying assumptions of this method make it generally inapplicable to the large class of software for which dependencies exist among the software's operations [2]. We propose conditional-event usage testing (CEUT), which will retain the benefits of traditional operational profile testing but which is not limited in the class of systems to which it applies. In CEUT, the expected usage of the software is modeled in such a way as to allow specification of conditions upon expected input event sequences. The model is used to generate test cases which will exercise the software in a fashion typical of actual operation. For systems with dependencies among operations, using CEUT resulted in test sequences that were typical of those experienced in operation, and allowed the benefits of operational profile-type testing to be realized on such systems.

REFERENCES

• 1: Mary Donnelly , Bill Everett , John Musa , Geoff Wilson, Best current practice of SRE, Handbook of software reliability and system reliability, McGraw-Hill, Inc., Hightstown, NJ, 1996
• 2: Joseph R. Horgan , Aditya P. Mathur, Software testing and reliability, Handbook of software reliability and system reliability, McGraw-Hill, Inc., Hightstown, NJ, 1996
• 3: {3} D.V. Mason, M. Fan, and D.M. Woit. Conditional test sequence generation. Technical Report work-in-progress, Faculty of Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1998.
• 4: John Musa , Gene Fuoco , Nancy Irving , Diane Kropfl , Bruce Juhlin, The operational profile, Handbook of software reliability and system reliability, McGraw-Hill, Inc., Hightstown, NJ, 1996
• 5: {5} J. Musa. Applying operational profiles in testing. In Proceedings 10th Intl. Software Quality Week, May 27-30, pages 1-25, 1997.
• 6: John D. Musa, Operational Profiles in Software-Reliability Engineering, IEEE Software, v.10 n.2, p.14-32, March 1993 [doi>10.1109/52.199724]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Testing tools (e.g., data generators, coverage testing)

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Diagnostics

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Reliability, Theory