Generating Effective Test Suites for Reactive Systems using Specification Mining Presented By

Failures in reactive embedded systems are often unacceptable. Effective test-ing of embedded systems to detect such unacceptable failures is a difficult task. We present an automated black box test suite generation technique for embedded systems. The technique is based on dynamic mining of specifica-tions, in the form of a finite state machine (FSM), from initial runs. The set of test cases thus produced may contain several redundant test cases. Many of the redundant test cases are then eliminated by an aggressive greedy test suite reduction algorithm to yield the final test suite. The tests generated by our technique were evaluated for their effectiveness on five case studies from the embedded domain. The evaluation of the results indicate that a test suite generated by our technique is promising in terms of effectiveness and scales easily. Further, the test suite reduction algorithm may sometimes remove non-redundant test cases too. Therefore, in our experimentation, we have also evaluated the change in the effectiveness of test suites due to this reduction. In this thesis, we describe the test suite generation and reduction tech-nique in detail and present the results of the case studies. 2This thesis is submitted to Bond University in fulfilment of the require-ments of the degree of Masters by Research. This thesis represents my own original work towards this research degree and contains no material which has been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at this University or any other institution, except where due acknowledgement is made