Mutation testing applied to Estelle specifications

Many researchers have pursued the establishment of a low-cost, effective testing and validation strategy at the program level as well as at the specification level. Mutation Testing is an error-based approach, originally introduced for program testing, that provides testers a systematic way to evaluate how good a given tester is. Some studies have also investigated its use to generate testers. In this article the application of Mutation Testing for validating Estelle specifications is proposed. A mutation operator set for Estelle-one of the crucial points for effectively applying Mutation Testing-is defined, addressing: the validation of the behavior of the modules, the communication among modules and the architecture of the specification. In this scope, these operators can be taken as a fault model. Considering this context, a strategy for validating Estelle-based specification is proposed and exemplified using the alternating-bit protocol.