A Holistic Approach to Test-Driven Model Checking

Testing is the most common validation method in the soft ware in dustry. It entails the execu tion of the software system in the real envi ron ment. Nevertheless, testing is a cost-in tensive process. Be cause of its conceptual simplicity the combination of formal methods and test methods has been widely advocated. Model checking be longs to the promising candidates for this marriage. The present paper modifies and ex tends the existing approaches in that, after the test case gen eration, a model checking step supports the manual test process. Based on the holistic approach to specifi cation-based construction of test suites, this paper proposes to generate test cases to cover both the specifi cation model and its com ple ment. This helps also to clearly differ enti ate the correct system outputs from the faulty ones as the test cases based on the specifi ca tion are to succeed the test, and the ones based on the complement of the specifica tion are to fail. Thus, the ap proach handles the oracle problem in an effective manner.