Approaches to Specification-Based Testing

Debra J. Richardson, T. Owen O Malley, C. Tittle. Approaches to Specification-Based Testing. In Symposium on Testing, Analysis, and Verification. pages 86-96, 1989. [doi]

Abstract

Current software testing practices focus, almost exclusively, on the implementation, despite widely acknowledged benefits of testing based on software specifications. We propose approaches to specification-based testing by extending a wide variety of implementation-based testing techniques to be applicable to formal specification languages. We demonstrate these approaches for the Anna and Larch specification languages.