Quality Assessment of Functional Tests for Reactive Systems

The functional correctness of reactive systems is often tested with functional black-box tests. Such reactive systems are commonly developed evolutionary, i.e. the number of features increase with each version while design documents are often not adapted appropriately. Based on this situation, functional tests have to be refined and maintained. Thus, the quality reducing software aging effect applies to test specifications as well.
 
In this project, methods for the quality assessment and improvement of functional tests are researched and developed. Starting with a quality model for test specifications and associated metrics, models are reverse-engineered from test speficiations. Analyses and formal methods such as model-checking are researched and applied on these models to automatically identify potential quality problems.