Applying model-based testing to healthcare products

Healthcare software systems are becoming more and more complex since they will be highly integrated to support a wide variety of healthcare workflows (e.g., financial, administration, diagnosis, and treatment). In addition, healthcare software systems will be more safety-critical as they will provide medical decision support for doctors. All of those require systematic and thorough testing of the systems before they are put into use or upgraded. Model-Based Testing (MBT) is an approach to apply formal, explicit system use-models to generate the test cases for testing the system behaviors under different input data sets. This paper describes our experiences in applying this approach to testing some Siemens healthcare software systems. We will report the benefits and challenges in using MBT for testing healthcare software systems.