Enhanced testing of domain specific applications by automatic extraction of axioms from functional specifications

Adequate testing is necessary and important to ensure reliability of software. Most test models are specification-based and fail to capture implicit domain specific properties. This paper presents a technique, which uses a HaskellDB specification of the software to extract domain specific properties and embed them into the test generation model. HaskellDB is an embedded domain specific functional and strongly typed language for database related applications. Specifying using HaskellDB ensures that a set of axioms based on type safeness of the database queries hold for the specification. The implementation of the application should also satisfy these properties and should be tested accordingly. We therefore propose a technique that extracts the axioms automatically from the HaskellDB specification and embeds additional test paths in the test model leading to an enriched test suite. We present an example application of the technique and compare the results against a manual testing technique.