A Research Overview of Tool-Supported Model-based Testing of Requirements-based Designs

Software testing aims at gaining confidence in software products through fault detection, by observing the differences between the behavior of the implementation and the expected behavior described in the specification. Nowadays, testing is the main verification technique used in industry, being a time and resource consuming activity. This has boosted the development of potentially more efficient testing techniques, like model-based testing, where test creation and execution can be automated, using an abstract system model as input. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in tool-supported model-based testing that starts from requirements-based models, by presenting and classifying some of the most mature tools available at this moment. Our goal is to get a deeper insight into the state-of-the-art in this area, as well as to form a position with respect to possible needs and gaps in the current tools used by industry and academia, which need to be addressed in order to enhance the applicability of model-based testing techniques. To achieve this, we extend an existing taxonomy with: (i) the test artifact, representing the type of information encoded in the model for the purpose of testing (i.e., functional behavior, extra-functional behavior, or the architectural description), and (ii) the mapping of test cases, which describes ways of using the generated test cases on the actual system under test. To provide further evidence of the inner-workings of different model-based testing tools, we select four representative tools (i.e, ProTest, UPPAAL Cover, MaTeLo, and CompleteTest) that we apply on a simple yet illustrative Coffee/Tea Vending Machine example, to show the differences in modeling notations, test case generation methods, and the produced test-cases.