Extended Design-by-Contract Approach to Specification and Conformance Testing of Distributed Software.


Extended Design-by-Contract Approach to Specification and Conformance Testing of Distributed Software.

Authors

V.Kuliamin, A.Petrenko, N.Pakoulin.

Abstract

Increasing effort in development of high quality distributed systems requires ground methodological base. Design by Contract approach looks very promising as a candidate since it helps to obtain component-wise specification and design, to separate concerns between developers, and makes development of high quality complex systems a manageable process. Unfortunately, in its classic form it can hardly be applied to distributed network applications because of lack of adequate means to describe asynchronous events. We extend Design by Contract with capabilities to describe callbacks and asynchronous communication between components and apply it to specify distributed software and to develop conformance test suites in automated manner. Specifications are developed in extensions of programming languages that makes them clear for industrial developers and decreases test construction effort. Practical results of numerous successful applications
of the method are described.

Full text of the paper in pdf

Keywords

Design by Contract, asynchronous events specification, distributed software specification, model based testing, automated test construction, specification extension of programming language, automatic test oracle generation.

Edition

Proc. of 9-th WMSCI, Orlando, USA, July 2005, v. VII. Model Based Development and Testing, pp. 65-70.

Research Group

Software Engineering

All publications during 2005 All publications