A Path-oriented Approach to Generating Executable Test Sequences for Extended Finite State Machines

Abstract

The Extended Finite State Machine (EFSM) is a commonly used model for specifying software systems. A test sequence for an EFSM is a sequence composed of values of input variables, which can make the EFSM “execute” along a complete path from entry to exit. Traditional test sequence generation methods for EFSM almost imitate those FSM-based approaches and focus on states identification. Most of them impose significant restrictions on the EFSM. This paper proposes a path-oriented approach to generating test cases for EFSM and presents a tool for test data generation. The experiments show that our tool can generate executable test sequences for EFSM models of software systems automatically in acceptable time.