The complex interactions appearing in service-oriented computing make coordination a key concern in service-oriented systems. In this paper, we present a fault-based method to generate test cases for component connectors from specifications. For connectors, faults are caused by possible errors during the development process, such as wrongly used channels, missing or redundant subcircuits, or circuits with wrongly constructed topology. We give test cases and connectors a unifying formal semantics by using the notion of design, and generate test cases by solving constraints obtained from the specification and faulty connectors. A prototype symbolic test case generator serves to demonstrate the automatizing of the approach.

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Specification mutation involves mutating a specification, and for each mutation a test is derived that distinguishes the behaviours of the mutated and original specifications. This approach has been applied with finite state machine based models. This paper extends mutation testing to finite state machine models that contain non-functional properties. The paper describes several ways of mutating a finite state machine with probabilities (PFSM) or stochastic time (PSFSM) attached to its transitions and shows how we can generate test sequences that distinguish between such a model and its mutants. Testing then involves applying each test sequence multiple times, observing the resultant behaviours and using results from statistical sampling theory in order to compare the observed frequency and execution time of each output sequence with that expected.

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While traditional testing can give evidence that an implementation conforms to a specification there is no guarantee that the implementation therefore also satisfies user requirements. Consequently, it is useful to derive test cases also from requirement properties. In this paper we introduce two new test criteria to measure adequacy of existing test suites and to derive test cases with regard to requirements formalized in linear temporal logic (LTL). The first criterion is complementary to existing criteria for requirement properties in that it focuses on cases where literals in a property should not affect the outcome of the property. The second criterion uses mutation to measure the sensitivity of a test suite with regard to the implemented requirements. In addition to coverage measurement these criteria can also be used to automatically create coverage adequate test suites with a model checker. The results of a case study illustrate the feasibility of the new criteria and demonstrate that they complement existing criteria.

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Java exception mechanism can effectively free a program from abnormal exits and help developers locate faults with the exception tracing stacks. It is necessary to verify whether the exception handling constructs are arranged appropriately. Some approaches have been developed to evaluate the test sets and improve the quality of them, so that they can raise more number of exceptions in programs. Mutation analysis is a practical method to evaluate the quality of test sets. This paper presents some new mutation operators for Java exception handling constructs. Moreover, equivalent mutants can be identified by our approach. A case study illustrates the effectiveness and characteristic features of these mutation operators.

Based on 1) research into mutation testing for general-purpose programming languages and 2) spreadsheet errors that have been reported in the literature, we have developed a suite of mutation operators for spreadsheets. We present an evaluation of the mutation adequacy of definition-use adequate test suites generated by a constraint-based automatic test-case generation system we have developed in previous work. The results of the evaluation suggest additional constraints that can be incorporated into the system to target mutation adequacy. In addition to being useful in mutation testing of spreadsheets, the operators can be used in the evaluation of error-detection tools and also for seeding spreadsheets with errors for empirical studies. We describe two case studies where the suite of mutation operators helped us carry out such empirical evaluations. The main contribution of this paper is a suite of mutation operators for spreadsheets that can be used for performing empirical evaluations of spreadsheet tools to indicate ways in which the tools can be improved.

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