Abstract

Abstract—Model checking is a technique for exhaustively searching the model’s state space for possible errors. Testing is a common method for enhancing the quality of a software product by checking for errors in program executions sampled according to some criterion called coverage criterion. Testing is a costly process especially if it is not supported by an appropriate method (and tool) for generating test suites, i.e. sets of test cases that fulfil a specific coverage criterion. This work introduces a method based on model checking, that supports generation of test cases for coverage based unit testing. As a proof of concept, we provide results obtained from the developed prototype tool support. Our method relies on automatically deriving from the source code a SPIN model with injected breakpoints. Test cases are obtained as counterexamples of violated Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulae that are automatically produced based on the selected coverage criterion.

Citations