Testing XPath Queries using Model Checking

XML’s rapid adoption as the data representation standard in web based systems is increasing the interest in applying XML query languages (as XPath) to access XML repositories. This technology entails new challenges related to testing, mainly derived from the hierarchical data representation in XML documents and the expressiveness of the query language. In this paper, we present a technique for the automatic generation of test cases for XPath expressions using the SPIN model checker. Both the XML schema and XPath query are previously modeled in the SPIN language and the test cases are obtained from the counterexamples that it generates.