Automated Generation of Integration Test Sequences from Logical Contracts

This paper exploits logical contracts (i.e., Preconditions and post conditions) to automatically generate integration tests. The approach transforms a contract-based test model into an operational model, which makes it feasible to analyze correctness of the test model and generate integration tests to meet coverage criteria of the test model. This approach has been implemented in MISTA, a tool for automated generation of executable tests. MISTA allows executable test code to be generated in a rich variety of programming languages (e.g., Java, C, C++, C#, and PHP) and test execution environments. We have evaluated the fault-detection capability of contract-based test models through fault injection. The results show that contract-based tests can be highly effective in fault detection and that robustness tests targeting the situations of broken contracts are critical to finding faults related to component interactions.