Generic and Effective Specification of Structural Test Objectives
This work addresses a foundational problem in software testing by providing a generic language for specifying structural test objectives, which could benefit test automation tool developers and practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing criteria.
The authors tackled the lack of a generic formalism for describing diverse test coverage criteria by introducing HTOL, a unified specification language that can encode numerous existing criteria and includes a coverage measurement tool, with initial experiments indicating it is efficient and practical.
While a wide range of different, sometimes heterogeneous test coverage criteria have been proposed, there exists no generic formalism to describe them, and available test automation tools usually support only a small subset of them. We introduce a unified specification language, called HTOL, providing a powerful generic mechanism to define test objectives, which permits encoding numerous existing criteria and supporting them in a unified way. HTOL comes with a formal semantics and can express complex requirements over several executions (using a novel notion of hyperlabels), as well as alternative requirements or requirements over a whole program execution. A novel classification of a large class of existing criteria is proposed. Finally, a coverage measurement tool for HTOL objectives has been implemented. Initial experiments suggest that the proposed approach is both efficient and practical.