Generic and Effective Specification of Structural Test Objectives

Abstract

A large amount of research has been carried out to automate white-box testing. While a wide range of different and sometimes heterogeneous code-coverage criteria have been proposed, there exists no generic formalism to describe them all, and available test automation tools usually support only a small subset of them. We introduce a new specification language, called HTOL (Hyperlabel Test Objectives Language), providing a powerful generic mechanism to define a wide range of test objectives. HTOL comes with a formal semantics, and can encode all standard criteria but full mutations. Besides specification, HTOL is appealing in the context of test automation as it allows handling criteria in a unified way.