Experimental Comparison of Test Case Generation Methods for Finite State Machines

Testing from finite state machines has been widely investigated due to its well-founded and sound theory as well as its practical application in different areas, e.g., Web-based systems and protocol testing. There has been a recurrent interest in developing methods capable of generating test suites that detect all faults in a given fault domain. However, the proposal of new methods motivates the comparison with traditional methods. In this context, we conducted a set of experiments that compares W, HSI, H, SPY, and P methods. The results have shown that H, SPY, and P methods produce smaller test suites than traditional methods (W, HSI). Although the P method presented the shortest test suite in most cases, its reduction is smaller compared with H and SPY. We have also observed that the reduction ratio in partial machines is smaller than that in complete machines.