Testing Prototypes Validity to Enhance Code Reuse

The complexity of distributed systems is a problem when designers want to evaluate their safety and liveness. Often, they are built by integration of existing components with newly developed ones. Actually, it is valuable to handle the integration of external pieces of software in the specification and testing activities. However, it is difficult to validate them formally unless doing reverse-engineering (which is a heavy procedure). This paper proposes to use structured formal specifications to generate a reasonable set of tests that evaluate behavior of software components in order to get an answer to both questions. To do so, we use the description of components’ external behavior and express it using the OF-Class formalism (an encapsulation of Colored Petri Nets). Test patterns are generated using an appropriate formalism, HML logic, and exploit various hypotheses corresponding to users’ testing procedure