Controllable combinatorial coverage in grammar-based testing

Authors

Ralf Lämmel and Wolfram Schulte

Abstract

Given a grammar (or other sorts of meta-data), one can trivially derive combinatorially exhaustive test-data sets up to a specified depth. Without further efforts, such test-data sets would be huge at the least and explosive most of the time. Fortunately, scenarios of grammar-based testing tend to admit non-explosive approximations of naive combinatorial coverage. In this paper, we describe the notion of controllable combinatorial coverage and a corresponding algorithm for test-data generation. The approach is based on a suite of control mechanisms to be used for the characterization of test-data sets as well-defined and understandable approximations of full combinatorial coverage. The approach has been implemented in the C#-based test-data generator Geno, which has been successfully used in projects that required differential testing, stress testing and conformance testing of grammar-driven functionality.

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{LS06,
 author    = "Ralf L{\"a}mmel and Wolfram Schulte",
 title     = "{Controllable combinatorial coverage in grammar-based testing}",
 editor    = "{The 18th IFIP International Conference on
               Testing Communicating Systems (TestCom 2006), 
               New York City, USA, May 16-18, 2006}",
 booktitle = "{Umit Uyar and Mariusz Fecko and Ali Duale}",
 publisher = "Springer Verlag",
 series    = "LNCS",
 volume    = "3964",
 year      = 2006,
 note      = {To appear; 18 pages}
}

Links

• Paper: [.pdf]; [.ps].

(C) Ralf Lämmel