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

In Specification and Description Language (SDL), a distributed system is viewed as a collection of communicating processes and its behavior is specified in terms of definitions of these processes. In particular, the desired control and data dependencies that must be established by a potential implementation of the system are expressed in SDL in terms of Extended Finite State Machine representations of communicating processes. To test the control and data flow aspects of the system, such dependencies in a system specification must be identified and utilized for the construction of tests. Based on a model which exposes the control and data dependencies within a specification of a distributed system given in SDL, this paper investigates the generation of tests for the data flow aspects of a system implementation, through the application of data flow oriented test selection criteria which have been originally proposed for testing programs written in procedural languages.

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