Formal specification based software testing: An automated approach

Formal specifications are becoming more and more important in the development of software. Software testing, as a method to validate the functionality of software against the specification will keep its justification also in a development process that is using formal specifications. This means that formal methods and testing will always be two complementary techniques for the reduction of errors in computer-based systems since neither technique is perfect in practice for realistic systems. This paper describes how formal specifications can be used to support the software testing process. An overview of formal specifications and software testing is given and then it is discussed that how the formal specifications can help in automation of various testing activities like test case generation, test input generation and test result evaluation. A tool developed to help in automation of test case generation is discussed.