Model-based passive testing of safety-critical components

Abstract

Passive testing is a complementary technique to active testing. For some types of systems, for example dynamic or adaptive distributed systems which are able to re-configure themselves at runtime in response to changes in their environments, exhaustive active testing before deployment is either theoretically impossible or practically not feasible. For such types of systems the additional application of the technique of passive testing is recommendable. However, a comprehensive theory and taxonomy of methods and techniques for model-based passive testing does –as far as we know– not yet exist and is from today’s perspective still very much a topic for future research in this domain. For this reason the presentation of the topic in this chapter is very much example-based such as to provide the reader with some first intuitions about what model-based passive testing is, what kinds of techniques could be used to implement it, and what could be some typical application scenarios for model-based passive testing in the domains of software systems, hardware systems, as well as embedded software+hardware systems.