Research and Development of a Supporting Tool for Test Result Analysis in Specification-Based Testing

Formal specification-based testing is generally superior to conventional black-box testing due to the potentials that effective test cases can be automatically generated and test results can be automatically analyzed. To make these potentials into reality, efficient tool support is necessary. In this paper, we describe our research on the development of a software tool supporting test result analysis. The tool includes two major functions: (1) automatic evaluation of predicate expressions written in the Structured Object-oriented Formal Language (SOFL) and (2) Automatic evaluation of the test oracle derived from a pre-post style process specification. To realize function (1), we have developed a package in which a set of classes are constructed in Java. Each class implements an abstract data type adopted in SOFL, providing a set of methods implementing the corresponding operators defined over the data type. To support function (2), we have developed an interpreter that evaluates the test oracle with the given values for all of the variables involved for a decision on whether bugs are found or not. We also present a testing for checking the quality of the tool