ICTSS 2012, Aalborg, Denmark

Photo: dinilu

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of ICTSS 2012, the 23rd IFIP Int. Conference on Testing Software and Systems, November 19-21, 2012 Aalborg, Denmark.

Please, consider submitting your testing work until June 11, 2012 (abstracts), June 18, 2012 (full papers).

Brian Nielsen, Aalborg University, DK and Carsten Weise, IVU Traffic Technologies, DE are the program chairs. For details see the conference homepage.

Last year, we presented a paper at ICTSS in Paris:

Christian Schwarzl, Bernhard K. Aichernig, and Franz Wotawa. Compositional random testing using extended symbolic transition systems. In Burkhart Wolff and Fatiha Zaïdi, editors, Testing Software and Systems - 23rd IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, ICTSS 2011, Paris, France, November 7-10, 2011. Proceedings, volume 7019 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 179–194. Springer-Verlag, 2011. (PDF)

Towards Symbolic Model-Based Mutation Testing: Combining Reachability and Refinement Checking

We present our newest paper on model-based mutation testing accepted at MBT 2012.

Model-based mutation testing uses altered test models to derive test cases that are able to reveal whether a modelled fault has been implemented. This requires conformance checking between the original and the mutated model. This paper presents an approach for symbolic conformance checking of action systems, which are well-suited to specify reactive systems.

We also consider non-determinism in our models. Hence, we do not check for equivalence, but for refinement. We encode the transition relation as well as the conformance relation as a constraint satisfaction problem and use a constraint solver in our reachability and refinement checking algorithms.

Explicit conformance checking techniques often face state space explosion. First experimental evaluations show that our approach has potential to outperform explicit conformance checkers.

This research is part of the TRUFAL project.

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Protocol conformance testing a SIP registrar

Photo: Tiptel

In recent years we have successfully applied model-based mutation testing to several implementations of communication protocols. In our work reported in

Bernhard K. Aichernig, Bernhard Peischl, Martin Weiglhofer, and Franz Wotawa. Protocol conformance testing a SIP registrar: an industrial application of formal methods. In Mike Hinchey and Tiziana Margaria, editors, Fifth IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2007), 10-14 September 2007, London, England, UK, pages 215–226. IEEE Computer Society, 2007. (PDF) (doi:10.1109/SEFM.2007.31)

we tested parts of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) used in internet telephony in order to register and connect communication partners.

Our case study targeted a commercial and an open-source (OpenSER) SIP registrar. Furthermore, we compared the mutation approach to a standard model-based test case generation technique. Our mutation technique generated 124 test cases, compared to 6000 test cases generated by the standard approach.

The 6000 tests discovered nine different faults in the commercial SIP registrar and four in the open-source registrar OpenSER.

Interesting was the fact that the comparatively small set of 124 mutation tests uncovered one additional fault in the commercial implementation that was not detected by the 6000 tests of the classical approach.

This is a further indication that mutation testing could play an important role in a mature testing process.

Another important contribution of this paper was to show how our mutation technique could be scaled to larger models. We sliced the models with the help of markers around the injected faults.

Industry Day at QSIC 2012, Xi'an, China

Photo: bachmont

The 12th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2012) will be held in Xi'an, China, 27 to 28 of August, 2012. The QSIC series of conferences is an established event bringing together people in the area of software and systems quality.

I was happy to learn that Zhou Chaochen (Chinese Academy of Sciences), my former boss at UNU-IIST in Macao, is the General Chair of the event. Zhou Chaochen is the inventor of the Duration Calculus. I joined the UNU faculty in Macao from 2002 to 2006.

For the first time, QSIC is planning an industry day with a dedicated program committee build from practitioners from industry and applied research. I was invited to join this program committee. Wolfgang Grieskamp (Google) and Hongyu Zhang (Tsinghua University) are the Industry Chairs of QSIC 2012.

Paper Submission Due: 23rd April 2012

Further details can be found on the website of QSIC 2012.

P.S: QSIC is an established conference series. I had my first QSIC paper in 2005 and my latest paper at QSIC 2010:

• Bernhard K. Aichernig and Percy Antonio Pari Salas. Test case generation by OCL mutation and constraint solving. In Kai-Yuan Cai and Atsushi Ohnishi, editors, QSIC 2OO5, Fifth International Conference on Quality Software, Melbourne, Australia, September 19-21, 2005, pages 64–71. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2005. (PDF) (doi:10.1109/QSIC.2005.63)
• Harald Brandl, Martin Weiglhofer, and Bernhard K. Aichernig. Automated conformance verification of hybrid systems. In Proceedings of QSIC 2010: the 10th International Conference on Quality Software, Zhangjiajie, China, July 14-15, 2010. IEEE Computer Society, 2010. Copyright by IEEE. (PDF).