Finite State Machine Testing Complete Round-Trip Versus Transition Trees: On the Road of Finding the Most Effective Criterion

Most software systems can be modeled either fully or partially using finite state machines. For this reason, many testing criteria for finite state machine models have been proposed and discussed by the research community. Among the studied testing criteria are complete round-trip paths and transition trees that cover round-trip paths in a piece wise manner. The theoretical comparison between the different proposed criteria does not provide enough evidence of effectiveness. Hence, empirical evaluation is needed to compare the criteria. In my thesis, I conduct many empirical experiments that aim at comparing the effectiveness of the complete round-trip paths test suites to the transition trees test suites in one hand, and comparing the effectiveness of the different techniques used to generate transition trees (breadth first traversal, depth first traversal, and random traversal) on the other hand. I also compare the effectiveness of all the testing trees generated using each single traversal criterion. Analyzing the experimental results lead to more than one hypothesis about the characteristics of the most effective among the evaluated test suites. The experimental results do not show consistent trends related to the suggested hypotheses. However, more case studies and more intuitions are to be tested to find a more effective criterion.