Automatic Generation of Test Cases from Formal Specifications using Mutation Testing

Testing of complex software systems often needs the execution of thousand of tests cases to find errors in the code and to ensure high integrity systems. Hence, it requires the testing tasks to be automated. Test case execution entails establishing preconditions and input data, observing output results, and comparing those results with a given oracle. This work presents two contributions: it uses a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm as a test case generator and also uses mutation testing on formal specifications using SOFL. Using mutation testing on formal specifications allows to find new test cases that would kill more mutants, resulting in a test suite potentially capable of finding more errors. The PSO algorithm is applied to generate the values of the input (test case). Software examples are used in this work to show the high efficiency of our testing framework.