3 Departamento de Computação, Universidade Federal de São Carlos-UFSCar

Abstract. This paper proposes a family of coverage testing criteria for specifications based on Statecharts. Statecharts are an extension of finite state machines with the capability of expressing parallelism and hierarchy. They have been used to specify the behavior of Reactive Systems. Recently, they have also been used in the context of object oriented software development. The two main approaches used for testing and validation of statecharts specifications are simulation and analysis of properties. However, these approaches do not essentially provide a mechanism for quantifying the specification testing activity and this compromises the testing quality assessment. The coverage criteria family proposed in this paper aims at complementing these approaches providing mechanisms either to evaluate the adequacy of test sequences generated by simulation, for example, or to guide the generation of adequate test sequences with respect to a given criterion. The underlying model to derive the requirements of the testing criteria is the statecharts reachability tree. The concepts and criteria are illustrated using an environment for editing and simulating statecharts called StatSim. Key Words: Software Engineering. 1