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International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning

RuleML+RR 2017: Rules and Reasoning pp 53–69Cite as

Can My Test Case Run on Your Test Plant? A Logic-Based Compliance Check and Its Evaluation on Real Data

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10364))

Abstract

Test automation is adopted by the majority of software and hardware producers since it speeds up the testing phase and allows to design and perform a large bunch of tests that would be hardly manageable in a manual way. When dealing with the testing of hardware instruments, different physical environments have to be created so that the instruments under test can be analyzed in different scenarios, involving disparate components and software configurations.

Creating a test case is a time consuming activity: test cases should be reused as much as possible. Unfortunately, when a physical test plant changes or a new one is created, understanding if existing test cases can be executed over the updated or new test plant is extremely difficult.

In this paper we present our approach for checking the compliance of a test case w.r.t. a physical test plant characterized by its devices and their current configuration. The compliance check, which is fully automated and exploits a logic-based approach, answers the query “Can the test case A run over the physical configured test plant B”?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/1/prweb10298185.htm.

  2. 2.

    http://testingconferences.org/.

  3. 3.

    This manual translation was enough for the purpose of our work, but if we had to generalize and automatize our approach, a logic-based language supporting a declarative representation of the structural aspects of object-oriented and frame-based languages like F-logic [15] might be taken into account in the modeling stage.

  4. 4.

    http://www.swi-prolog.org/packages/jpl.

  5. 5.

    Since TC is the actual test case and MCTP(TC) is its representation, in the sequel we prefer TC to MCTP(TC) to stress the fact that our experiments involved real or fictional but realistic TCs.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Vladimir Zaikin who contributed to the realization of some parts of this work, and the engineers from BlindedCompany’s test automation team involved in the project. We also thank the reviewers for their valuable comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DISCO Department, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Daniela Briola

  2. DIBRIS Department, Università degli Studi di Genova, Genoa, Italy

    Viviana Mascardi

Authors
  1. Daniela Briola
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  2. Viviana Mascardi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniela Briola .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Stefania Costantini

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Enrico Franconi

  3. Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    William Van Woensel

  4. Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Roman Kontchakov

  5. Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

    Fariba Sadri

  6. SINTEF/University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Dumitru Roman

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Briola, D., Mascardi, V. (2017). Can My Test Case Run on Your Test Plant? A Logic-Based Compliance Check and Its Evaluation on Real Data. In: Costantini, S., Franconi, E., Van Woensel, W., Kontchakov, R., Sadri, F., Roman, D. (eds) Rules and Reasoning. RuleML+RR 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10364. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61252-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61252-2_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61251-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61252-2

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