New Directions in Software Quality Assurance Automation

Abstract

A formalism is suggested for specifying environment behavior models for software test scenario generation based on attributed event grammars. The environment model may contain descriptions of the events triggered by the software outputs and of the hazardous states in which the system could arrive, thus providing a framework for specifying properties of software behavior within the given environment. The behavior of the system can be rendered as an event set with two partial ordering relations: precedence and inclusion (event trace). This formalism may be used as a basis for automation tools for test generation, test result monitoring and verification, for experiments to gather statistics about software safety, and for evaluating of dependencies of system’s behavior on environment parameters. The monitoring activities can be implemented within a uniform framework as computations over event traces.