Sun Meng at CWI had the idea to translate my UTP-theory of mutation testing to REO connectors. This resulted in a TASE 2009 paper published in July:
Bernhard K. Aichernig, Farhad Arbab, Lacramioara Astefanoaei, Frank S. de Boer, Sun Meng, and Jan Rutten. Fault-based test case generation for component connectors. In TASE 2009, Third IEEE International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering, Tianjin, China, July 29–31, pages 147–154. IEEE Computer Society, July 2009. Copyright by IEEE. (PDF) (doi:10.1109/TASE.2009.14)
The paper demonstrates that the idea of formalizing basic software engineering concepts in Hoare and He's Unifying Theories of Programming really helps to transfer knowledge and technology. In this case mutation testing found a new application domain: component connectors for modeling coordination in service-oriented architectures.
Abstract. The complex interactions appearing in service-oriented computing make coordination a key concern in serviceoriented systems. In this paper, we present a fault-based method to generate test cases for component connectors from specifications. For connectors, faults are caused by possible errors during the development process, such as wrongly used channels, missing or redundant subcircuits, or circuits with wrongly constructed topology. We give test cases and connectors a unifying formal semantics by using the notion of design, and generate test cases by solving constraints obtained from the specification and faulty connectors. A prototype symbolic test case generator serves to demonstrate the automatizing of the approach.
