Minimum/maximum delay testing of product lines with unbounded parametric real-time constraints

• Published in: The Journal of systems and software Vol. 149; pp. 535 - 553
• Main Authors: Luthmann, Lars, Gerecht, Timo, Stephan, Andreas, Bürdek, Johannes, Lochau, Malte
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.03.2019
• Subjects: Best-case/Worst-case execution time; Model-based testing; Real-time systems; Software product lines; Timed automata; 68Q45; Model-based testing; Timed automata; Best-case/Worst-case execution time; Real-time systems; 68N30; 68Q60; Software product lines
• ISSN: 0164-1212; 1873-1228
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2018.12.028

•Model for product lines with unbounded configurable real-time constraints.•Family-based test-suite generation for covering infinite configuration spaces.•Novel coverage criterion for best-case/worst-case execution times.•Case studies and experimental evaluation results show applicability. Non-functional requirements like real-time behaviors are of ever-growing interest in many application domains of software product lines. Consequently, existing modeling formalisms and analysis techniques for reasoning about time-critical behaviors have to be adapted to product-line engineering, too. Featured timed automata (FTA) extend timed automata (TA) by feature constraints to enable efficient family-based verification of real-time properties. Here, we present configurable parametric timed automata (CoPTA) to further extend expressiveness of FTA by freely configurable and a-priori unbounded timing intervals of real-time constraints. Hence, CoPTA models impose infinite configuration spaces which makes variant-by-variant analysis practically infeasible. Instead, we present a family-based test-suite generation methodology for CoPTA models ensuring symbolical location coverage for every model configuration. Furthermore, we define a novel coverage criterion, called Minimum/Maximum Delay (M/MD) coverage, requiring every location in a CoPTA model to be reached by test cases with minimum/maximum possible durations, for systematically investigating best-case/worst-case execution times. We extend our family-based test-suite generation methodology to also achieve M/MD coverage on CoPTA models. Our evaluation results, obtained from applying our CoPTA tool to a collection of subject systems, reveal efficiency improvements of family-based test-suite generation, as compared to a variant-by-variant strategy in case of finite configuration spaces.