Specification for Testing

The success of model-based testing, in automating the testing of an implementation given its state-based (or model-based) specification, raises the question of how best the specification can be tweaked in order to facilitate that process. This paper discusses several answers. Motivated by an example from webbased systems, and taking account of the restriction imposed by the testing interface, it considers both functional and non-functional properties. The former include laws, implicit system invariants and other consistency conditions whilst the latter include security leaks. It concludes that because of the importance of the link between specification and implementation in the testing process, there is a trade-off between genuinely useful testing information and the incorporation of some degree of information about the link, not normally regarded as part of the specification. Chris George is Associate Director of UNU-IIST. He is one of the main contributors to RAISE, particularly the RAISE method, and that remains his main research interest. Before coming to UNU-IIST he worked for companies in the UK and Denmark. Paddy Krishnan is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Information Technology at Bond University, Australia, and a Research Associate of UNU-IIST. His interests lie in program specification and verification. Percy Salas is a KJRoss PhD student at Bond University, supervised by Paddy Krishnan in model-based testing. He has been a fellow at UNU-IIST and a lecturer at the Universidad San Pablo in Arequipa, Peru. Jeff Sanders is Senior Research Fellow at UNU-IIST, having recently joined from the Programming Research Group at Oxford. His interests lie largely in Formal Methods. Copyright c © 2007 by UNU-IIST