A Petri net based approach for establishing necessary software design and testing requirements

In this paper, a Petri net based approach for establishing the minimal design and testing requirements for software systems is presented. It is based on a technique called the minimal transition cover set (MTCS), developed from minimal transition invariants of the corresponding Petri net model (Ramaswamy and Barber, 1997). The MTCS is based on identifying the important decisions being made within the design model. Depending on the design requirements, a designer may choose to expand lower level procedures during an analysis, and thereby, generate information about other lower-level decisions selectively within the design which are to be made available to other sub-systems. A further modification of the MTCS approach is used to derive the decision nodes that are buried within the design model. Again, a software test engineer may either choose to selectively build test cases for individual modules and incorporate them as stubs in a higher level module, or integrate these modules within higher level modules before deriving appropriate test case scenarios. Building test cases based on the deep decision nodes gives the necessary test cases for system verification. The equivalence and the easier applicability of MTCS based test case generation method with McCabe´s cyclomatic complexity measure is also briefly addressed