An overview of Lutess a specification-based tool for testing synchronous software

Test data generation and test execution are both time-consuming activities when done manually. Automated testing methods promise to save a great deal of human effort. This especially applies to reactive programs which have complex behaviour over time and which require long test sequences. We present Lutess, a testing environment for synchronous reactive software. Lutess produces automatically and dynamically test data with respect to some environment constraints of the program under test. Moreover, it allows to trace the test execution and spot the situations where the program violates its properties. Lutess offers several specification-based testing methods. They aim at simulating more realistic environment behaviours, producing relevant data to test thoroughly a given property or driving the program under test into interesting situations. To produce the test data, the methods use different types of guides: statistical distribution of the input generation, properties, or behavioural patterns. Lutess proved to be powerful and easy to use in industrial case studies. Lutess won the Best Tool Award of the first Feature Interaction Detection Contest. The tool is described from a practical point of view.