Towards Symbolic Model-Based Mutation Testing: Combining Reachability and Refinement Checking
This addresses a bottleneck in testing reactive systems by improving efficiency for developers and testers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing symbolic methods.
The paper tackles the problem of state space explosion in model-based mutation testing by presenting a symbolic conformance checking approach for action systems, using constraint solvers to encode transition and conformance relations, with initial experiments indicating potential outperformance over explicit checkers.
Model-based mutation testing uses altered test models to derive test cases that are able to reveal whether a modelled fault has been implemented. This requires conformance checking between the original and the mutated model. This paper presents an approach for symbolic conformance checking of action systems, which are well-suited to specify reactive systems. We also consider nondeterminism in our models. Hence, we do not check for equivalence, but for refinement. We encode the transition relation as well as the conformance relation as a constraint satisfaction problem and use a constraint solver in our reachability and refinement checking algorithms. Explicit conformance checking techniques often face state space explosion. First experimental evaluations show that our approach has potential to outperform explicit conformance checkers.