Schema-guided testing of message-oriented systems

Abstract

Effective testing of message-oriented software requires describing the expected behaviour of the system and the causality relations between messages. This is often achieved with formal specifications based on temporal logics that require both first-order and metric temporal constructs – to specify constraints over data and real time. This paper proposes a technique to automatically generate tests for metric first-order temporal specifications that match well-understood specification patterns. Our approach takes in properties in a high-level specification language and identifies test schemas (strategies) that are likely to falsify the property. Schemas correspond to abstract classes of execution traces, that can be refined by introducing assumptions about the system. At the low level, concrete traces are successively produced for each schema using property-based testing principles. We instantiate this approach for a popular robotic middleware, ROS, and evaluate it on two systems, showing that schema-based test generation is effective for message-oriented software.