We got our work on mutation testing of communication protocols published in the International Journal of Software and Informatics.
The article is part of a special double issue on Formal Methods edited by Prof. Dines Bjorner. The journal is published by the Chinese Academy of Science and has an international editing board.
Martin Weiglhofer, Bernhard Aichernig, and Franz Wotawa. Fault-based conformance testing in practice. International Journal of Software and Informatics, 3(2–3):375–411, June/September 2009. Copyright by Institute for Software, Chinese Academy of Science. (PDF)
In this work we present our results on testing two communcation protocols the Session Initiation Protocol and the Conference Protocol. The protocols are modeled in LOTOS and then mutation testing is applied on the LOTOS specs for generating test cases. We present detailed data of the test process including the nice result that we were able to find a new bug in an implementation that was not detected by random and scenario-based testing.
Paper abstract: Conforming to protocol specications is a critical issue in modern distributed software systems. Nowadays, complex service infrastructures, such as Voice-over-IP systems, are usually built by combining components of di erent vendors. If the components do not correctly implement the various protocol specications, failures will certainly occur. In the case of emergency calls this may be even life-threatening. Functional black-box conformance testing, where one checks the conformance of the implemented protocol to a specication becomes therefore a major issue. In this work, we report on our experiences and ndings when applying fault-based conformance testing to an industrial application. Besides a discussion on modeling and simplications we present a technique that prevents an application from implementing particular faults. Faults are modeled at the level of the specication. We show how such a technique can be adapted to specications with large state spaces and present results obtained when applying our technique to the Session Initiation Protocol and to the Conference Protocol. Finally, we compare our results to random and scenario based testing.
