@phdthesis {Simula.simula.1870,
	title = {Empirical Evaluations on the Cost-Effectiveness of State-Based Testing: Industrial Case Studies and Extensible Tool},
	year = {2012},
	month = {September},
	school = {University of Oslo},
	type = {phd},
	address = {Oslo, Norway},
	abstract = {Software testing is often conducted as a manual, ad hoc task, as compared to following an automated and more systematic procedure. Consequently, testing is likely to be incomplete and costly to ensure the required level of dependability. Safety-critical software systems must be tested so as to ensure its safe behavior. Despite the importance of being systematic while testing, all testing activities take place, even for safety-critical software, under resource constraints. In order for industry to make the right choices when deciding on how to test their software, more knowledge about how various testing strategies compare in terms of cost effectiveness is necessary. As thorough software testing is an expensive task, reducing the cost of testing while ensuring sufficient fault-detection effectiveness should be of common interest to industry. Enabling automated testing to check the compliance of implementations against their specifications, model-based testing has become a popular area of research and practice. Test models, for example expressed as UML state machines, describe the expected behavior of the software and provide the basis for systematic and automated generation of test suites. One specific area of research is related to how different coverage criteria of the test models affect the cost-effectiveness of the resulting test suites. This thesis assesses six state-based coverage criteria and evaluates their cost and fault-detection effectiveness based on 26 real faults collected in a field study at ABB. Eleven of the faults were sneak paths - thus, only 15 of the faults could be killed by the six conformance coverage criteria. Two different test oracles have been applied to compare their cost effectiveness. Moreover, this thesis also investigates the effect of increasing the test-model abstraction level on the cost-effectiveness of the testing strategies. The coverage criteria were complemented with sneak-path testing. To enable evaluation of the state-based testing techniques, a model-based testing approach, TRUST, was developed and used to automatically generate the studied test suites. Four industrial case studies evaluate each of the testing aspects: coverage criteria, oracles, test models, and sneak paths. The case studies are based on a research project at ABB where a safety-monitoring component in a control system was developed using state machines and implemented according to the extended state-design pattern. The findings of this thesis include: (1) Development and demonstration of a model-based testing approach based on model transformations. (2) An empirical investigation of the cost effectiveness of six systematic coverage criteria applied in an industrial project and evaluated by using real faults: all transitions (AT), all round-trip paths (RTP), all transition pairs (ATP), paths of length 2 (LN2), paths of length 3 (LN3), and paths of length 4 (LN4). (3) A comparison of two oracles: Oracle O1 checks the state invariant of the resulting state in addition to that the current state pointer of the system corresponds to the expected state after the test. Oracle O2 only checks that the state pointer to the current state of the system corresponds to the expected state after the test. (4) An evaluation of the cost-effectiveness when varying the level of details in the test model. (5) A demonstration of the importance of sneak-path testing. The results show that test suites generated from a precise model according to coverage criteria AT, RTP, ATP, and LN4 when utilizing oracle O1, yields high-quality test suites powerful enough to detect the seeded faults (except from sneak paths). The average cost measured as preparation and execution time were as follows: AT: 5,603 seconds; RTP: 2,731 seconds; ATP: 32,160 seconds; and LN4: 6,145 seconds. LN3 killed 93 percent (14/15) of the mutants at the cost of 645 seconds. Across all six coverage criteria, 88 percent of the seeded faults were detected at 7,905 seconds in preparation and execution time. Applying the weaker oracle O2 at an average decrease in cost around 13 percent, 67 percent of the mutants were killed. By removing details from the test model, the cost of testing was significantly decreased with 85 percent (for both oracles O1 and O2), while only reducing the fault-detection ability by 24 percent for oracle O1 and 37 percent for oracle O2. Note that these results were obtained in spite of a high number of infeasible test cases in test suites generated from the less detailed model as a consequence of wrong test data. Moreover, the sneak-path test suite detected the eleven remaining mutants that could not be killed by any of the conformance test suites. Thus, the results indicate quite strongly that sneak-path testing is a necessary step in state-based testing as the presence of sneak paths is undetectable by conformance testing. Finally, this thesis has demonstrated how model transformations can enable state-based testing. The tool was demonstrated to be extensible to support different types of state based coverage criteria and oracles.},
	author = {Nina Elisabeth {Holt}}
}
