model-based testing

Conformiq Designer: For Testers or Developers?

We are asked every now and then whether Conformiq Designer is a tool for testers or a tool for developers. After all, it is a tool for automated test design and it automatically generates tests from computer readable models that describe the intended behavior of the tested system. It is important to understand that these models do not directly ...

Why One Testing Design Method Isn’t Enough

Every now and then Conformiq Designer and Creator are compared against other testing tools that employ one type of test design heuristic, for example a combinatorial testing tool for generating optimized pair-wise test data. The capability of generating such combinatorial data combinations is one testing method that in practice has been observed ...

Conditional Coverage Heuristics Explained

Some time ago I wrote a short blog post about equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis. Now with new version of Conformiq Designer coming out very soon we have introduced quite a few new testing heuristics and coverage options that are based on equivalence class partitioning I wanted to write about how Conformiq can use these new ...

Combinatorial Test Data Generation with Conformiq

Suppose a system model states that when a message comes in, it is forwarded out unchanged. This particular message has a number of fields, some of them integers, some strings. For some reason there is cause to suspect that the forwarding feature in the real implementation might be flawed, so we would like to have a number of different message ...

Selecting the Right MBT Tool: Key Factors

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 ...

Conformiq Blog: Improve Your Testing Game

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…)

Software Processes Accommodating MBT

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 ...

How Computers Design Tests Differently from Humans

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 ...

Top 3 Problems with Model-Based 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 ...

Skill Profile of a Successful Conformiq User

Automated test design with Conformiq Designer is a new way to create, maintain and manage tests. Using Conformiq successfully requires a different skill profile than manual testing does. The crucial difference to manual testing is that manual testing typically does not require any programming skills. At the same time, creating models is quite near ...

Michael Mlynarski: Testing ROI Challenges

On his model-based testing blog, Michael Mlynarski writes: In this session we have discussed the ROI of software testing techniques. More than 20 experienced testers or test managers had difficulties on formulating the ROI of any testing technique. Two main arguments were about reducing the costs for bug-fixes in late stages of the development ...