Towards uniform modeling and holistic testing of hardware and software

Abstract

This paper introduces an approach to uniform modeling and testing of hardware and software systems and their faults. As an example, for hardware under consideration, designs at a behavioral level will be used, implemented in Hardware Description Language (HDL). For software, an example will be borrowed from a graphical user interface design. Both examples will be modeled by finite state machines. The mutation of these models leads to lucid hardware and software fault models, respectively. Original models and their mutants will then be used to generate test cases for positive testing and negative testing, respectively, forming a holistic test strategy. A positive test is supposed to validate the system under legal (expected, regular) circumstances, whereas a negative test checks the behavior of the system under illegal (unexpected, irregular) situations. Non-trivial examples are used to validate and analyze the approach with respect to uniform modeling and testing capability. © 2019 IEEE.