KITSS - USING KNOWLEDGE-BASED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOR FUNCTIONAL TESTING

Automated testing of large embedded systems is one of the most expensive and time-consuming parts of the software life cycle. The Knowledge-based Interactive Test Script System (KITSS) automates functional testing in the domain of telephone switching software. KITSS uses novel Artificial Intelligence approaches to improving this Software Engineering activity. KITSS has a statistical parser to support the specification of test cases in English. These tests are converted into a formal representation that is audited for coverage and sanity. To accomplish the conversion, KITSS uses a theorem prover-based inference mechanism and a knowledge base as the domain model with both a static terminological logic and a dynamic temporal logic. Finally, the corrected tests are translated into an automated test language.