Translating Object-Z specifications to passive test oracles

Author

McDonald, Jason ; Strooper, Paul

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Electr. Eng., Queensland Univ., Qld., Australia

fYear

1998

fDate

9-11 Dec 1998

Firstpage

165

Lastpage

174

Abstract

A test oracle provides a means for determining whether an implementation functions according to its specification. A passive test oracle checks the behaviour of the implementation, but does not attempt to reproduce this behaviour. The paper describes the translation of formal specifications of container classes to passive test oracles. Specifically, we use Object-Z for specifications and C++ for oracles. We discuss several practical issues for the use of formal specifications in test oracle generation. We then present the translation process and illustrate it with an example based on an integer set class. Our approach is illustrated with an example based on an integer set class

Keywords

formal specification; object-oriented languages; program interpreters; specification languages; C++; Object-Z specifications; container classes; formal specifications; integer set class; passive test oracles; test oracle generation; translation process; Automatic testing; Computer science; Containers; Costs; Electrical capacitance tomography; Formal specifications; Humans; Software testing; Sorting; State-space methods;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Formal Engineering Methods, 1998. Proceedings. Second International Conference on

Conference_Location

Brisbane, Qld.

Print_ISBN

0-8186-9198-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICFEM.1998.730580

Filename

730580