An Automated Test Generation Technique for Software Quality Assurance

The world's increased dependence on software-enabled systems has raised major concerns about software reliability and security. New cost-effective tools for software quality assurance are needed. This paper presents an automated test generation technique, called Model-based Integration and System Test Automation (MISTA), for integrated functional and security testing of software systems. Given a Model-Implementation Description (MID) specification, MISTA generates test code that can be executed immediately with the implementation under test. The MID specification uses a high-level Petri net to capture both control- and data-related requirements for functional testing, access control testing, or penetration testing with threat models. After generating test cases from the test model according to a given criterion, MISTA converts the test cases into executable test code by mapping model-level elements into implementation-level constructs. MISTA has implemented test generators for various test coverage criteria of test models, code generators for various programming and scripting languages, and test execution environments such as Java, C, C++, C#, HTML-Selenium IDE, and Robot Framework. MISTA has been applied to the functional and security testing of various real-world software systems. Our experiments have demonstrated that MISTA can be highly effective in fault detection.