Experimental evaluation of FSM-based testing methods

The development of test cases is an important issue for testing software, communication protocols and other reactive systems. A number of methods are known for the development of a test suite based on a formal specification given in the form of a finite state machine. Well-known methods are called the W, Wp, UIO, UIOv, DS, H and HIS test derivation methods. These methods have been extensively used by research community in the last years; however no proper comparison has been made between them. In this paper, we experiment with these methods to assess their complexity, applicability, completeness, fault detection capability, length and derivation time of their test suites. The experiments are conducted on randomly generated specifications and on a realistic protocol called the simple connection protocol.