Software Testing Method Based on Model Comparison

A model comparison based software testing method (MCST) is proposed. In this method, the requirements and programs of software under test are transformed into the ones in the same form, and described by the same model describe language (MDL).Then, the requirements are transformed into a specification model and the programs into an implementation model. Thus, the elements and structures of the two models are compared, and the differences between them are obtained. Based on the diffrences, a test suite is generated. Different MDLs can be chosen for the software under test. The usages of two classical MDLs in MCST, the equivalence classes model and the extended finite state machine (EFSM) model, are described with example applications. The results show that the test suites generated by MCST are more efficient and smaller than some other testing methods, such as the path-coverage testing method, the object state diagram testing method, etc.