Test Generation using Model Checking

Testing in the software industry is, in general an ad hoc task. There are guidelines to follow but in most cases do not cover sufficient portions of the software product. Recent work has been done to automatically generate test cases such that designers are no longer responsible for designing the test cases but ensuring that the specification of the software is valid. These formal specifications are then used as inputs into the automatic test generation tools, the results of the tool would be a set of test cases that do a better job at covering the range of tests than current non-automated methodologies. In this paper, we surveay a few such techniques that use model checking technologyas the test generation engine. There are two areas of interest we intend to cover. First is the actual test generation. We discuss a couple techniques that alter the specification to force the model checker to output counter-examples that are then used as test cases for the software application. Second we examine a few methods that attack automated generation from a state space perspective. That is the specifications that are designed for practical industrial products typically contain far too many states for the model checker to verify to completion. These methods attempt to reduce the state space while maintaining sufficient details that test generation is still possible.