Semi-Automatic Test Case Generation from CO-OPN Specifications

In this paper we will describe our work on automatic generation of tests for Systems Under Test (SUT) described in the CO-OPN specification language that has been developed in our laboratory. CO-OPN (Concurrent Object Oriented Petri Nets) is a formalism for describing concurrent software systems that possesses most of the characteristics we can find in mainstream semi-formal modeling languages. Given its formal semantics, CO-OPN is a suitable formalism for model-based test case generation. Within our work we have developed a test selection language for CO-OPN specifications which we have named SATEL (Semi-Automatic Testing Language). The purpose of SATEL is to allow the test engineer to express abstract test intentions that reflect his/her knowledge about the semantics of the SUT. Test intentions are expressed by execution traces with variables that can expanded into full test cases – this is done using the CO-OPN specification of the SUT as a reference for calculating the oracles. We call our test selection language semi-automatic because it allows explicitly choosing the shape of the test cases in a test intention, while relying on automatic mechanisms for calculating the equivalence classes of operations defined in the model.