A formal approach to practical test selection

This paper presents a formal approach to the practical test selection problem that arises in conformance test laboratories when the question is which test cases from a given test suite should be executed. The existing standard ([1]), which provides a formal framework to conformance testing, does not deal with this aspect, although it is an important part of the test laboratories’ activity. Our goal is to work out a theoretical background to formal methods tackling the test selection problem. To this aim, we define the relevant notions unambiguously.