Towards Property Oriented Testing

Conformance testing is a kind of functional testing where a formally verified specification is considered and test cases are generated so that conclusions can be established regarding the possibility of acceptance/rejection of conforming/nonconforming implementations. If the focus is on a complete specification, test suites may be impractical and even infinite with unclear relations between test cases and the specification. Property oriented testing focuses on particular, eventually critical, properties of interest. The specification of one or more properties drives the test process that checks whether they are satisfied by an implementation. Properties are often stated as test purposes, targeting testing at a particular functionality. This paper presents an overview of approaches to property oriented testing for reactive systems, focusing on labelled and symbolic transition systems.