As detailed in a blog post I wrote a couple of months ago, the core of Conformiq DesignerTM is a custom crafted semantics driven, symbolic state space exploration algorithm for test generation from system models (because this is really the only known solution that robustly generates both test inputs and outputs from a system model without user ...
Blogs
Interest towards model-based testing has increased quite significantly over the years as people have started to reach limits of traditional approaches and at the same time started to see and understand the benefits that applying MBT can have to the quality assurance function. In this blog post, I’m outlining what is really important when you are ...
Boundary value analysis is a refinement of the equivalence class partitioning method which again is one of the most generally applicable methods for black-box test design. The idea of equivalence class partitioning is to divide the all possible inputs to the system into “equivalence classes”, i.e. sets of inputs that should produce “analogous” ...
Test generation from system models is computationally very hard: Just generating input sequences that cover all the statements of a system model is theoretically an undecidable problem, meaning it can be never solved completely. This does not mean there couldn’t be an algorithm that handles most of the industrially relevant problem instances, but ...
Quite recently we added a support for expressing ”regular expressions” in the Conformiq models. As this is quite an interesting topic, I’m detailing this feature a bit in this post. (more…)
I recently had an opportunity to present in ETSI’s UCAAT conference a way to use component-enabled MBT to overcome some of the shortcomings with current interoperability and end-to-end testing approaches. Because this raised quite a lot of interest in the conference, I wanted to write a short blog post about the subject. (more…)
When talking about black-box and white-box testing, the term "box" refers to the system under test or SUT where the "color of the box" refers to the visibility that a tester has to the internal details of the SUT. When we talk about black-box testing, the tester judges the quality and correctness of the system without seeing inside this box ...
In this post I'll go through the basics for "stochastic use case testing". It is sometimes called also "Markov chaining" or "Markov testing". There are variations of this technique, of course, but my aim here is to cover the common ground and share some thoughts on where methods like this are best applied. (more…)
People ask often from us if model-based testing with Conformiq Designer can be a good fit for e.g. Agile, Test-Driven Development, Scrum or RUP. Now instead of providing a short answer ("yes"), I will try to explain in this post how model-based testing changes a software process, where that change occurs, and what is its impact. I will also give ...
One complaint against computer-generated test cases is that they differ from those designed by humans. Somehow, computer-generated test cases have a different feel to them, and it is sometimes difficult for humans to grasp what is the crux or focal point of a test case produced by a model-based test generator, such as Conformiq Designer™. But why ...
According to the recent model-based testing user survey (see here), the respondents saw on the average a 59% reduction in escaped bugs, 17% reduction in testing costs, and 25% reduction in testing time.
What do these figures mean? Let's say that a (software) product has 100 defects (that can manifest themselves) when it enters the testing ...
According to the recent model-based testing users survey, the top three problems MBT users face are in this order (see p. 26 of the report):
Modeling is too hard
Models blow up (the tool in use does not scale to complex models)
Generated tests miss bugs
These are all real problems and we have certainly seen customers face them (after ...