Using coverage to automate and improve test purpose based testing

Test purposes have been presented as a solution to avoid the state space explosion when selecting test cases from formal models. Although such techniques work very well with regard to the speed of the test derivation, they leave the tester with one important task that influences the quality of the overall testing process: test purposes have to be formulated manually. In this paper, we present an approach that assists a test engineer with test purpose design in two ways: it allows automatic generation of coverage based test suites and can be used to automatically exercise those aspects of the system that are missed by handcrafted test purposes. We consider coverage of LOTOS specifications, and show how labeled transition systems derived from such specifications have to be extended in order to allow the application of logical coverage criteria to LOTOS specifications. We then show how existing tools can be used to efficiently derive test cases and suggest how to use the coverage information to minimize test suites while generating them. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.