Adding Correctness Checking to Test Automation Platform

Test Automation Platform©1 (TAP) is a software system that developers can use to test their own hardware or software (or combinations of both). Developers create TAP test plans by combining and configuring individual test steps in a GUI. Developers can also develop their own test steps with .NET to better suit their needs. Since (manual) programming is always prone to errors, TAP users need support to increase the confidence in the correctness of their test steps and test plans. This paper is a contribution in that direction. Our proposal consists in adding static and dynamic constraints to the test steps and the use of a store-like structure to track the active constraints to be evaluated before execution (design time) and during the execution of the test plan. Developers can add these constraints using an annotation language for .NET source code. The paper presents the overall proposal, the semantics of the consistency checking method, and some preliminary results with a case study.