Quality assurance of test specifications for reactive systems

Extensive testing of modern communicating systems often involves large and complex test suites that need to be maintained throughout the life cycle of the tested systems. For this purpose, quality assurance of test suites is an inevitable task that eventually may have an impact on the quality of the system under test as well. In this thesis, we present a holistic method towards the analytical quality engineering of test specifications. We cover in detail what constitutes the quality of test specifications by adapting a quality model for software to test specifications and present how to apply targetoriented static testing to test specifications. We also introduce a dynamic testing method for test specifications, including a reverse engineering approach for test behavior models, and present a method for the consistency analysis of system responses in test suites. Based on the quality assessments made, the test suites can be improved regarding specific quality characteristics of this quality model. Finally, we validate and demonstrate the applicability of our approaches in a case study by means of a prototype implementation.