Data flow analysis and testing of Abstract State Machines

Alessandra Cavarra ( Oxford University Computing Laboratory )

In this talk I will introduce an approach to apply data flow testing techniques to Abstract State Machines. Since traditional data flow coverage criteria are strictly based on the mapping between a program and its flow graph, they cannot be directly applied to ASMs: we are interested in tracing the flow of data between states in ASM runs as opposite to between nodes in a program's flow graph. Therefore, I have revised the classical concepts in data flow analysis and defined them on two levels: the syntactic (rule) level, and the computation (run) level. I also specified a family of data flow coverage criteria and introduce a model checking-based approach to generate automatically test cases satisfying the given coverage criteria.