Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research focuses on a model-based testing framework, called ""Assume-Guarantee-Infer"". As usual for model-based testing, in the framework, the starting point is a model of the expected behaviour of a system under test (SUT). However, differently from the most of the existing approaches, the goal of this research is to consider models which are not necessarily complete and precise. Incompleteness of a model is implied by partiality of knowledge about the expected behaviour of a system under test; while impreciseness may come from optional behaviours or over-abstraction of the actual behaviour which includes infeasible executions and is usually nondeterministic. The tester assumptions about implementation faults in an SUT at hand are then formalized in the form of some fault model. Test execution results may lead the tester to modify either the initial SUT model or the SUT itself if faults are detected. Once the rectified SUT passes all the executed tests the latter can help refine the model of the SUT, i.e., infer a more complete and precise model. A refined model is needed to better document the tested system and to generate if required additional tests increasing the level of the confidence in the quality of the system. This step completes the Assume-Guarantee-Infer testing framework.The significance of the proposed research lies in an increased level of automation of testing activities which can be achieved based on the Assume-Guarantee-Infer testing framework and in a wider acceptance of formal approaches to testing, since the main hurdle in their application, the availability of a complete and precise SUT model can significantly be reduced by allowing incomplete and imprecise models.