Software QA FYI - SQAFYI

Testing in Tongues: How to Test When You Don’t Know the Language

By: Sergio Mera and Yiming Cao

Producing high-quality software demands a significant effort in testing, which is probably one of the most expensive and intensive parts of the software development process. There have been many approaches for improving testing reliability and effectiveness, from the simplest functional black-box tests to heavyweight methods involving theorem provers and formal requirement specifications. Nevertheless, testing doesn’t always include the necessary level of thoroughness, and discipline and methodology are often absent.

Microsoft has been successfully applying model-based testing (MBT) to its internal development process for more than a decade now. MBT has proven a successful technique for a variety of internal and external software products. Its adoption has steadily increased over the years. Relatively speaking, it has been well received in the testing community, particularly when compared with other methodologies living on the “formal” side of the testing spectrum.

Spec Explorer is a Microsoft MBT tool that extends Visual Studio, providing a highly integrated development environment for creating behavioral models, plus a graphical analysis tool for checking the validity of those models and generating test cases from them. We believe this tool was the tipping point that facilitated the application of MBT as an effective technique in the IT industry, mitigating the natural learning curve and providing a state-of-the-art authoring environment.

In this article we provide a general overview of the main concepts behind MBT and Spec Explorer, presenting Spec Explorer via a case study to showcase its main features. We also want this article to serve as a collection of practical rules of thumb for understanding when to consider MBT as a quality assurance methodology for a specific testing problem. You shouldn’t blindly use MBT in every testing scenario. Many times another technique (like traditional testing) might be better a choice.

What Makes a Testable Model in Spec Explorer?
Even though different MBT tools offer different functionality and sometimes have slight conceptual discrepancies, there’s general agreement about the meaning of “doing MBT.” Model-based testing is about automatically generating test procedures from models.

Models are usually manually authored and include system requirements and expected behavior. In the case of Spec Explorer, test cases are automatically generated from a state-oriented model. They include both test sequences and the test oracle. Test sequences, inferred from the model, are responsible for driving the system under test (SUT) to reach different states. The test oracle tracks the evolution of the SUT and determines if it conforms to the behavior specified by the model, emitting a verdict.

The model is one of the main pieces in a Spec Explorer project. It’s specified in a construct called model programs. You can write model programs in any .NET language (such as C#). They consist of a set of rules that interact with a defined state. Model programs are combined with a scripting language called Cord, the second key piece in a Spec Explorer project. This permits specifying behavioral descriptions that configure how the model is explored and tested. The combination of the model program and the Cord script creates a testable model for the SUT.

Of course, the third important piece in the Spec Explorer project is the SUT. It isn’t mandatory to provide this to Spec Explorer to generate the test code (which is the Spec Explorer default mode), because the generated code is inferred directly from the testable model, without any interaction with the SUT. You can execute test cases “offline,” decoupled from model evaluation and test-case generation stages. However, if the SUT is provided, Spec Explorer can validate that the bindings from the model to the implementation are well-defined.

Case Study: A Chat System
Let’s take a look at one example to show how you can build a testable model in Spec Explorer. The SUT in this case is going to be a simple chat system with a single chat room where users can log on and log off. When a user is logged on, he can request the list of the logged-on users and send broadcast messages to all users. The chat server always acknowledges the requests. Requests and responses behave asynchronously, meaning they can be intermingled. As expected in a chat system, though, multiple messages sent from one user are received in order.
One of the advantages of using MBT is that, by enforcing the need to formalize the behavioral model, you can get a lot of feedback for the requirements. Ambiguity, contradictions and lack of context can surface at early stages. So it’s important to be precise and formalize the system requirements, like so:
R1. Users must receive a response for a logon request.
R2. Users must receive a response for a logoff request.
R3. Users must receive a response for a list request.
R4. List response must contain the list of logged-on users.
R5. All logged-on users must receive a broadcast message.
R6. Messages from one sender must be received in order.


Spec Explorer projects use actions to describe interaction with the SUT from the test-system standpoint. These actions can be call actions, representing a stimulus from the test system to the SUT; return actions, capturing the response from the SUT (if any); and event actions, representing autonomous messages sent from the SUT. Call/return actions are blocking operations, so they’re represented by a single method in the SUT. These are the default action declarations, whereas the “event” keyword is used to declare an event action. Figure 1 shows what this looks like in the chat system.

Figure 1 Action Declarations
// Cord code
config ChatConfig
{
action void LogonRequest(int user);
action event void LogonResponse(int user);
action void LogoffRequest(int user);
action event void LogoffResponse(int user);
action void ListRequest(int user);
action event void ListResponse(int user, Set userList);
action void BroadcastRequest(int senderUser, string message);
action void BroadcastAck(int receiverUser,
int senderUser, string message);
// ...
}

With the actions declared, the next step is to define the system behavior. For this example, the model is described using C#. System state is modeled with class fields, and state transitions are modeled with rule methods. Rule methods determine the steps you can take from the current state in the model program, and how state is updated for each step.
Because this chat system essentially consists of the interaction between users and the system, the model’s state is just a collection of users with their states (see Figure 2).

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Testing in Tongues: How to Test When You Don’t Know the Language