Information gain of black-box testing

ISSN： 0934-5043

Source： Formal Aspects of Computing, Vol.23, Iss.4, 2011-07, pp. : 513-539

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Abstract

For model-based black-box testing, test cases are often selected from the syntactic appearance of the specification of the system under test, according to a pre-given test data adequacy criterion. We introduce a novel approach that is semantics-based, independent of the syntactic appearance of the system specification. Basically, we model the system under test as a random variable, whose sample space consists of all possible behavior sets (with respect to the specification) over the known interface of the black-box. The entropy of the system is measured as the (Shannon) entropy of the random variable. In our criterion, the coverage of a test set is measured as the expected amount of entropy decrease (i.e. the expected amount of information gained) once the test set is run. Since our criterion is syntactic independent, we study the notion of information-optimal software testing where, within a given constraint, a test set is selected to gain the most information.