Coverage of formal property specifications has important ramifications in design verification. Mutation coverage, a well studied approach towards specification coverage, checks whether the specification fails in the presence of a fault. Existing mutation coverage methods are broadly divided into those which inject the fault into a given implementation and those which inject the fault directly into the specification. This paper presents a theory which unifies these contrasting approaches and extends the mutation coverage approach to partial implementations where some components are given, and for the others, we only have component specifications.

This paper presents a formal methodology for test generation from formal specifications. Our method can be used for test generation for critical faults in component-based designs. Test generation for critical faults is done entirely using formal specifications and therefore the theory inherently guarantees that a generated test will be applicable to any implementation of the specifications. The theory makes fault analysis possible at an abstract level of design where the complete logic is not specified.