Chaining Test Cases for Reactive System Testing

Peter Schrammel, Tom Melham, Daniel Kroening

Abstract: Testing of synchronous reactive systems is challenging because long input sequences are often needed to drive them into a state to test a desired feature. This is particularly problematic in on-target testing, where a system is tested in its real-life application environment and the amount of time required for resetting is high. This paper presents an approach to discovering a test case chain—a single software execution that covers a group of test goals and minimises overall test execution time. Our technique targets the scenario in which test goals for the requirements are given as safety properties. We give conditions for the existence and minimality of a single test case chain and minimise the number of test case chains if a single test case chain is infeasible. We report experimental results with a prototype tool for C code generated from Simulink models and compare it to state-of-the-art test suite generators.