On Model Checker Based Testing of Electronic Contracting Systems

The paper investigates the suitability of model checker based testing techniques for contract monitoring and enforcing services. In particular a contract monitoring service called Contract Compliance Checker (CCC) is considered as the system under test. The CCC is provided with an executable specification of the contract in force and is able to determine whether the actions of the business partners are consistent with respect to the contract. Contractual interactions can give rise to highly complex execution traces, and it is quite unrealistic to assume that such traces can be produced manually for testing purposes. The paper describes how a model checker can be used effectively at design time to validate the consistency of the contractual clauses and later, to produce test case validation sequences to test the correctness of the actual implementation.