Test case verification by model checking

Verification of a test case for testing the conformance of protocol implementations against the formal description of the protocol involves verifying three aspects of the test case: expected input/output test behavior, test verdicts, and the test purpose. We model the safety and liveness properties of a test case using branching time temporal logic. There are four types of safety properties: transmission safety, reception safety, synchronization safety, and verdict safety. We model a test purpose as a liveness property and give a set of notations to formally specify a test purpose. All these properties expressed as temporal formulas are verified using model checking on an extended state machine graph representing the composed behavior of a test case and protocol specification. This methodology is shown to be effective in finding errors in manually developed conformance test suites. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.