Test case prioritisation aims at finding an ordering which enhances a certain property of an ordered test suite. Traditional techniques rely on the availability of code or a specification of the program under test. In this paper, we propose to use string distances on the text of test cases for their comparison and elaborate a prioritisation algorithm. Such a prioritisation does not require code and can be useful for initial testing and in cases when code is difficult to instrument. We also briefly report on preliminary results of an experiment where the proposed prioritisation technique was compared with random permutations and four classical string distance metrics were evaluated.

Abstract A formal framework for the analysis of execution traces collected from distributed systems at run-time is presented. We introduce the notions of event and message traces to capture the consistency of causal dependencies between the elements of a trace. We formulate an approach to property testing where a partially ordered execution trace is modeled by a collection of communicating automata. We prove that the model exactly characterizes the causality relation between the events/messages in the observed trace and discuss the implementation of this approach in SDL, where ObjectGEODE is used to verify properties using model-checking techniques. Finally, we illustrate the approach with industrial case studies.

We consider a formal framework for property verification of web applications using Spin model checker. Some of the web related properties concern all states of the model, while others - only a proper subset of them. To be able to discriminate states of interest in the state space, we solve the problem of property specification in LTL over a subset of states of a system under test while ignoring the valuation of the properties in the rest of them. We introduce specialized operators that facilitate specifying properties over propositional scopes, where each scope constitutes a subset of states that satisfy a propositional logic formula. Using the proposed operators, the user can specify web properties more concisely and intuitively. We illustrate the proposed solution in specifying properties of web applications and discuss other potential applications.

We investigate the problem of configuration verification for the extended FSM (EFSM) model. This is an extension of the FSM state identification problem. Specifically, given a configuration ("state vector") and an arbitrary set of configurations, determine an input sequence such that the EFSM in the given configuration produces an output sequence different from that of the configurations in the given set or at least in a maximal proper subset. Such a sequence can be used in a test case to confirm the destination configuration of a particular EFSM transition. We demonstrate that this problem could be reduced to the EFSM traversal problem, so that the existing methods and tools developed in the context of model checking become applicable. We introduce notions of EFSM projections and products and, based on these notions, we develop a theoretical framework for determining configuration-confirming sequences. The proposed approach is illustrated on a realistic example.