Greetings from Portugal
I spent the last weekend in sunny Braga, Northern Portugal. The occasion was the Model Based Testing 2007 workshop, held in conjunction with the ETAPS conference. The country was beautiful, weather pleasant and food very cheap (at least when compared with the Finnish price level).
On the scientific level, the quality of the papers was mixed. Maybe one of the highlights was the presentation by Swedish researchers about efficient test generation for timed systems. This reasearch was, of course, coupled with the well-known UPPAAL toolset and its derivatives.
On Sunday morning I gave my invited talk on the use of model-based testing in standardization. This joint presentation by Mr. Stephan Schulz from ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) was more about pragmatics than theory. In particular, in the presentation I summarized how the application of model-based testing in standardization differs from applying it in, say, in-house software development.
Currently there are so many small workshops and conferences touching model-based testing (e.g. MBT, A-MOST, MoDeVa, FATES, M-TOOS) that one could guess some consolidation will take place in the future. Maybe a conference dedicated to model-based testing..? Whatever “model-based testing” then means. I proposed in the workshop that one interpretation of “model-based testing” in the research world could be “algorithmic methods for black-box testing that are based on behavioral models of systems under test”, and this was received quite well.