New Journal Article on Test-Case Generation and Fault Propagation

Our new article on fault propagation and its relation to model-based test-case generation was just published:

Bernhard K. Aichernig, Elisabeth Jöbstl, and Martin Tappler. Does this fault lead to failure? Combining refinement and input-output conformance checking in fault-oriented test-case generation. Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, 85(5, Part 2):806–823, 2016. (PDF) (doi:10.1016/j.jlamp.2016.02.002)

The publisher Elsevier provides a free download of the original article until December 2.

The paper describes how we generate test-cases for reactive systems by

1. injecting faults into the models (mutation testing)
2. generating a test-case that triggers this fault (refinement checking)
3. extending the test-case until an observational failure could be produced (ioco checking).

We show that this is more efficient than previous approaches that search for observational equivalences directly, i.e. skipping Step 2.

Our case study of a car-alarm controller shows that for some subtle faults we need up to nine additional interactions until a fault becomes visible at the interface.

Professional Activities in 2016

I have been invited to serve on the PC of SVT 2017, the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing Software Verification and Testing Track that will be held in Marrakech, Morocco, April 3 – 7, 2017.

 Here is a summary of my activities in 2016:

• PC Co-Chair of TAP 2016, the 10th International Conference on Tests & Proofs, July 2016,Vienna, Austria.
• Invited Speaker at 1st Workshop on Monitoring and Testing of Cyber-Physical Systems at CPS Week 2016.
• Associate Editor of the new open access journal Frontiers in ICT, section Formal Methods 
• PC Member of A-MOST 2016, FM 2016, Doctoral Symposium of FM 2016, ICFEM 2016, ICTAC 2016, TASE 2016, ICTSS 2016, QACV16, and SVT 2017.
• Key Researcher in the projects Dependable Things, TRUCONF, and CRYSTAL.
• Board Member of Formal Methods Europe (until April)
• Chair of the Study Commission for the studies Computer Science, Software Development and Business Management, and the Teacher Learning Programme Computer Science at TU Graz
• Teaching Quality Assurance in Software Development, Software Paradigms, Model-based Testing, Logic and Logic Programming, and Functional Programming.

Designing Embedded Domain-Specific Languages in Scala

I am glad to share with you an excellent Bachelor's thesis written by Philipp Gabler and supervised by me. The topic is fascinating as it discusses the features of the programming language Scala to support the design of DSLs. It includes a case-study on our modeling language for model-based testing.

Philipp Gabler, Designing Embedded Domain-Specific Languages in Scala: a Case Study with Action Systems, Bachelor's Thesis, Graz University of Technology, Institute for Software Technology,  June 2015.

Here is the PDF for download.