Use of Verification Techniques for Components Testing

In this paper, we report about the use of the model checker SPIN to generate test cases. We have adapted the SPIN tool for automatically generating test cases for an embedded component. The generation of the latter is based on the counter-example generation mechanism of SPIN. For that purpose, we have implemented inside SPIN our test generation algorithm that allows to generate a test case for each test objective to be covered. The strategy of our algorithm permits to manage the state space explosion in combination with the efficient existing algorithms of SPIN to handle large state spaces. We define in this paper how we characterize the behavior of the embedded component. Given a PROMELA model of the complete specification, i.e with the component, our method helps to generate efficiently tests from a test purpose written in Propositional Linear Temporal Logic Formulas. Finally, we exercise our prototype on a case study and obtain first promising results.