Effectiveness of Automated Function Testing with Petri Nets: A Series of Controlled Experiments
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2014
Abstract
Existing work has developed techniques for automated generation of function tests from high-level Petri nets. Yet there is no empirical evidence that demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of this approach. This paper presents a series of controlled experiments to evaluate the fault detection capabilities of various strategies for test generation from high-level Petri nets. We built test models and generated executable test code for three subject programs. Then we executed the test code against more than 300 mutants of the subject programs. Each mutant is a variation of the original subject program with one injected fault. The experiment results show that (a) the reachability coverage-based tests are more effective than the tests for state coverage and for transition coverage, (b) postcondition-based test oracles are more effective than state-based oracles, (c) robustness tests with invalid inputs are critical to improving fault detection capability. In particular, the reachability coverage-based tests together with robustness tests killed 99.7% of the mutants.
Publication Information
Xu, Dianxiang; and Shen, Ning. (2014). "Effectiveness of Automated Function Testing with Petri Nets: A Series of Controlled Experiments". Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2014-January, 211-216.