TUGEN: An automatic test suite generator integrating data-flow and control-flow methods

The research of methods for automatic test suite generation is one of the active branches in protocol conformance testing. This paper first analyzed the flaw of many existing test generation methods, and then presented a new method and its implementation called TUGEN. This new method integrates the features of data-flow and control-flow test. TUGEN is based on a formal model called EBE that specifies only the external behavior of a protocol. We introduce the UIO sequence algorithm to determine the state and the concept of AIO tree to solve the nondeterminism of a protocol. We also use the protocol constraint set, which is very flexible, to control the complexity of exploring space. Furthermore, we can improve the EBE specification and the protocol constraint set to optimally generate the test suite by simulation testing. We have generated many test suites including OSI protocols and TCP/IP protocols. We believe that the improved TUGEN can be a powerful utility for test suite generation.