A little language for testing

Alex Groce, Jervis Pinto

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

The difficulty of writing test harnesses is a major obstacle to the adoption of automated testing and model checking. Languages designed for harness definition are usually tied to a particular tool and unfamiliar to programmers; moreover, such languages can limit expressiveness. Writing a harness directly in the language of the software under test (SUT) makes it hard to change testing algorithms, offers no support for the common testing idioms, and tends to produce repetitive, hard to- read code. This makes harness generation a natural fit for the use of an unusual kind of domain-specific language (DSL). This paper defines a template scripting testing language, TSTL, and shows how it can be used to produce succinct, readable definitions of state spaces. The concepts underlying TSTL are demonstrated in Python but are not tied to it.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNASA Formal Methods - 7th International Symposium, NFM 2015, Proceedings
EditorsKlaus Havelund, Gerard Holzmann, Rajeev Joshi
PublisherSpringer-Verlag
Pages204-218
Number of pages15
ISBN (Print)9783319175232
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event7th International Symposium on NASA Formal Methods, NFM 2015 - Pasadena, United States
Duration: Apr 27 2015Apr 29 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9058

Conference

Conference7th International Symposium on NASA Formal Methods, NFM 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPasadena
Period4/27/154/29/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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