PrimaVera

Fiscal 1995 Project Portfolio Report

Sriram Sankar
sriram.sankar@sun.com

Overall Objective

Objective for FY95

• Commence the design of ADL-II-a new and improved version of the current ADL and adapt it for use with OMG IDL and C++. Also begin the implementation of the translation and testing tools for ADL-II.

• Design and implement specification-based coverage tools to determine the comprehensiveness of test data based on the specification of the system being tested.

• Apply Assertion Definition Language Translator (ADLT), a specification-based software testing tool for C programs, on real-life examples. We have applied ADLT successfully on the ISO standard image processing library called PIKS. The final goal is to produce a certification capability to verify compliance of PIKS implementations with the standard. We have also commenced other similar projects on systems such as OpenGL, and a hardware testing tool at Schlumberger.

Description

The PrimaVera group has a close collaboration with the ADL group, whose primary goal is to develop and maintain ADLT. ADLT is being developed in collaboration with X/Open and MITI. PrimaVera's responsibility is to go beyond the deliverables of the ADLT project and study other ways in which formal specifications may be used to solve software engineering problems.

Based on the experiences with ADLT, the PrimaVera group is creating the next version of the ADL specification language and its associated tool set. The refined ADL will be more user friendly and will be easier to adapt into ongoing software engineering projects. In addition to C, the new language and tools will also support OMG IDL and C++.

The ADLT toolset requires the user to provide an ADL specification and a TDD test data specification. The TDD is a tool with which an engineer can create test data. This is still a creative process and, hence, error prone. In the new tools, there will be capabilities provided to measure the "goodness" or comprehensiveness of test data and, in some cases, will also allow for the automatic generation of test data.

The PrimaVera project is collaborating with various organizations, such as the U.S. Government Central Imagery Office, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Andersen Consulting, Schlumberger, and the University of California at Irvine, in an effort to facilitate rapid adoption of its technology.

Accomplishments

• Continued to collaborate with the ADL team in releasing versions of ADLT on time.

• Designed the ADL Base Language, an intermediate representation for different ADL specializations (such as ADL for IDL, ADL for C++, etc.), which serves as a common framework for all tool support.

• Collaborated with Prof. Debra Richardson and her graduate student Juei Chang of the University of California, Irvine in developing a capability to determine "goodness" (or comprehensiveness) of tests with respect to an ADL specification.

• Commenced a collaboration with the U.S. government Central Imagery Office, NIST, and an ISO standards subcommittee in using ADL as a means for specifying and conformance testing implementations of an image processing standard PIKS with respect to a specification of the standard.

• Launched an aggressive summer internship program and attracted a group of extremely talented students. As part of their summer activities, we have commenced the design of ADL specializations for IDL and C++.

• Organized a workshop on formal methods co-located with a premier testing conference-an ideal forum to bring together researchers interested in PrimaVera-like activities. We have given talks and tutorials at various places both within and outside Sun.

References

Chang, J., D. Richardson, and S. Sankar. "Structural Specification Based Testing with ADL." International Symposium for Software Testing and Analysis (Forthcoming).

Chang, J., S. Sankar, and D. Richardson. "Automated Test Selection from ADL Specifications." Proceedings of the California Software Engineering Symposium (March 1995).

Doong, R. and S. Sankar. "Specification Based Coverage Criteria for ADL." International Symposium for Software Testing and Analysis (Forthcoming). SML-95-0203.

Sankar, S. and M. Hefner. "Formal Methods Applied to Conformance Testing." International Conference on Software Engineering Proceedings of the Formal Methods Workshop (April 1995).

Patents Issued

Title: Automatic Generation of Test Drivers
Inventors: Roger Hayes, Alberto Pio-Di-Savoia
Filed: 06/30/92 (07/814,864)
Issued: 10/25/94 (5,359,546)

Title: Automatic Generation of Auto-checking Testing Functions
Inventors: Roger Hayes, Luigi Alberto Pio-Di-Savoia, Jonathan Gibbons, James Daniel Halpern
Filed: 06/30/92 (07/906,697)
Issued: 10/18/94 (5,357,452)

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