AN EVALUATION OF MODEL-BASED TESTING IN INDUSTRIAL PRACTICE: FROM SYSTEM MODELLING TO TEST GENERATION.

Abstract: Vehicular systems have become intensively sophisticated and their software content has increased swiftly in this era. While developing the vehicular software, the requirements which should be satisfied are more complex in comparison to other types of software. As vehicular systems interact with physical processes, the high reliability of the system is always demanded. This is making testing a difficult but necessary step in developing reliable systems. Due to the competition and customer demands companies tends to update the software systems of their products as often as possible. Such demands put increased pressure on making testing more efficient and cost-effective. Traditionally, software testing is performed manually and in an ad-hoc manner. Moreover, manual testing becomes costlier when software is updated often. Hence there is the need for using techniques which can complement such manual techniques.   Model-based testing (MBT) is a test automation technique which promises to increase reliability, understandability, and maintainability of test cases by the use of test models, automatic test generation and execution. MBT[WU1]  is the process of test generation from design models of the system requirements and functionality. There are studies in the literature showing initial results on the advantages of using MBT with some promising results. Such promises are inspiring companies to take an interest in adopting the MBT approach. This thesis aims to evaluate the use of MBT in industrial practice and investigates the automated testing approach and its applicability in the context of Volvo CE.   The results of this thesis show that structural and behavior models can be created based on functional architecture and requirements of a real subsystem provided by Volvo-CE. These models are generated in Conformiq Creator MBT tool. Test cases are generated using different model coverage criteria.  The results suggest that activity and structure diagrams, developed using MBT, are useful for describing the test specification of an accelerator pedal control function subsystem. The use of MBT results in less number of test cases compared to manual testing performed by industrial engineers for these subsystems. We showed that MBT can be used for system modelling and test case generation in the vehicular domain.  [WU1]MBT is the process of testing design models of the system requirements and functionality.