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Model-Based Testing Under Parametric Variability of Uncertain Beliefs

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Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2020)

Abstract

Modern software systems operate in complex and changing environments and are exposed to multiple sources of uncertainty. Considering uncertainty as a first-class concern in software testing is currently on an uptrend. This paper introduces a novel methodology to deal with testing under uncertainty. Our proposal combines the usage of parametric model checking at design-time and online model-based testing algorithms to gather runtime evidence and detect requirements violations. As modeling formalism, we adopt parametric Markov Decision Processes where transition probabilities are not fixed, but are possibly given as a set of uncertain parameters. The design-time phase aims at analyzing the parameter space to identify the constraints for requirements satisfaction. Then, the testing activity applies a Bayesian inference process to identify violations of pre-computed constraints. An extensive empirical evaluation shows that the proposed technique is effective in discovering violations and is cheaper than existing testing under uncertainty methods.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The MBT module is open source software publicly available at https://github.com/SELab-unimi/mbt-module. A replication package of the experiments is available at https://github.com/SELab-unimi/sefm2020-replication-package.

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Camilli, M., Russo, B. (2020). Model-Based Testing Under Parametric Variability of Uncertain Beliefs. In: de Boer, F., Cerone, A. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58768-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58768-0_10

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