Applying Extended Finite State Machines in Software Testing of Interactive Systems

Model Based Testing (MBT) is a functional testing technique that makes use of information from behavioral models of the software to carry out the testing task. This technique has been commonly used in testing of interactive systems, where the used model represents the system behavior reacting to user’s actions. Finite State Machines (FSMs) are one of the most used modeling techniques for MBT. However, traditional FSMs do not provide mechanisms to model important behavioral aspects of the software such as its data flow. This paper proposes an extension to the traditional FSMs, which provides data flow modeling mechanisms and is used as a basis to define a set of functional testing criteria, extending known structural testing criteria. Moreover, the application of the defined functional testing criteria is compared, through a practical experiment, to the application of their corresponding structural testing criteria – both applied as adequacy criteria.