Test generation based on control and data dependencies within system specifications in SDL

In Specification and Description Language (SDL), a distributed system is vi ewed as a collection of communicating processes and its behavior is specifi ed in terms of definitions of these processes. In particular, the desired c ontrol and data dependencies that must be established by a potential implem entation of the system are expressed in SDL in terms of Extended Finite Sta te Machine representations of communicating processes. To test the control and data how aspects of the system, such dependencies in a system specifica tion must be identified and utilized for the construction of tests. Based o n a model which exposes the control and data dependencies within a specific ation of a distributed system given in SDL, this paper investigates the gen eration of tests for the data flow aspects of a system implementation, thro ugh the application of data how oriented test selection criteria which have been originally proposed for testing programs written in procedural langua ges. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.