The testing process is typically systematic in test data selection and test execution. For the most part, however, the effective use of test oracles has been neglected, even though they are a critical component of the testing process. Test oracles prescribe acceptable behavior for test execution. In the absence of judging test results with oracles, testing does not achieve its goal of revealing failures or assuring correct behavior in a practical manner; manual result checking is neither reliable nor cost-effective. We argue that test oracles should be derived from specifications and in conjunction with testing criteria, represented in a common form, and their use made integral to the testing process. For complex, reactive systems, oracles must reflect the multiparadigm nature of the required behavior. Such systems are often specified using multiple languages, each selected for its utility in specifying a particular computational paradigm. Thus, we are developing an approach for derivi...

Current software testing practices focus, almost exclusively, on the implementation, despite widely acknowledged benefits of testing based on software specifications. We propose approaches to specification-based testing by extending a wide variety of implementation-based testing techniques to be applicable to formal specification languages. We demonstrate these approaches for the Anna and Larch specification languages. 1 Introduction Specifications provide valuable information for testing. Most software testing techniques, however, rely solely on the implementation for information upon which to select test data. These implementation-based testing techniques focus on the actual behavior of the implementation but ignore intended behavior, except inasmuch as test output is manually compared against it. On the other hand, considering information from formal specifications enables testing intended behavior as well as actual functionality. Specification-based testing techniques may direct ...