Chaining Test Cases for Reactive System Testing (extended version)
This addresses the problem of high testing time and reset costs in on-target testing for reactive systems, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of testing synchronous reactive systems by introducing an approach to discover a test case chain that covers multiple test goals in a single execution, minimizing test execution time, and reports experimental results showing improved efficiency compared to state-of-the-art test suite generators.
Testing of synchronous reactive systems is challenging because long input sequences are often needed to drive them into a state at which a desired feature can be tested. This is particularly problematic in on-target testing, where a system is tested in its real-life application environment and the time required for resetting is high. This paper presents an approach to discovering a test case chain---a single software execution that covers a group of test goals and minimises overall test execution time. Our technique targets the scenario in which test goals for the requirements are given as safety properties. We give conditions for the existence and minimality of a single test case chain and minimise the number of test chains if a single test chain is infeasible. We report experimental results with a prototype tool for C code generated from Simulink models and compare it to state-of-the-art test suite generators.