Abstract—One of the major challenges in the verification of complex industrial Cyber-Physical Systems is the difficulty of determining whether a particular system output or behaviour is correct or not, the socalled test oracle problem. Metamorphic testing alleviates the oracle problem by reasoning on the relations that are expected to hold among multiple executions of the system under test, which are known as Metamorphic Relations (MRs). However, the development of effective MRs is often challenging and requires the involvement of domain experts. In this paper, we present a case study aiming at automating this process. To this end, we implemented GAssertMRs, a tool to automatically generate MRs with genetic programming. We assess the cost-effectiveness of this tool in the context of an industrial case study from the elevation domain. Our experimental results show that in most cases GAssertMRs outperforms the other baselines, including manually generated MRs developed with the help of domain experts. We then describe the lessons learned from our experiments and we outline the future work for the adoption of this technique by industrial practitioners.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3468264.3473920

Authors:
Jon Ayerdi, Valerio Terragni, Aitor Arrieta, Paolo Tonella, Goiuria Sagardui, Maite Arratibel

Title of the source: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE ’21)

Publisher: ACM

Relevant pages: 1264-1274

Year: 2021

Abstract—Elevators are among the oldest and most widespread transportation systems, yet their complexity increases rapidly to satisfy customization demands and to meet quality of service requirements. Verification and validation tasks in this context are costly, since they rely on the manual intervention of domain experts at some points of the process. This is mainly due to the difficulty to assess whether the elevators behave as expected in the different test scenarios, the so-called test oracle problem. Metamorphic testing is a thriving testing technique that alleviates the oracle problem by reasoning on the relations among multiple executions of the system under test, the so-called metamorphic relations. In this practical experience paper, we report on the application of metamorphic testing to verify an industrial elevator dispatcher. Together with domain experts from the elevation sector, we defined multiple metamorphic relations that consider domain-specific quality of service measures. Evaluation results with seeded faults show that the approach is effective at detecting faults automatically.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE5003.2020.00019

Authors:
Jon Ayerdi, Sergio Segura, Aitor Arrieta, Goiuria Sagardui, Maite Arratibel

Title of the source: IEEE 31st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)

Publisher: IEEE

Relevant pages: 104-114

Year: 2020

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Abstract—Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are systems that integrate digital cyber computations with physical processes. The software embedded in CPSs has a long life-cycle, requiring constant evolution to support new requirements, bug fixes, and deal with hardware obsolescence. To date, the development of software for CPSs is fragmented, which makes it extremely expensive. This could be substantially enhanced by tightly connecting the development and operation phases, as is done in other software engineering domains (e.g., web engineering through DevOps). Nevertheless, there are still complex issues that make it difficult to use DevOps techniques in the CPS domain, such as those related to hardware-software co-design. To pave the way towards DevOps in the CPS domain, in this paper we instantiate part of the reference architecture presented in the H2020 Adeptness project, which is based on microservices that allow for the continuous deployment, monitoring and validation of CPSs. To this end, we elaborate a systematic methodology that considers as input both domain expertise and a previously defined taxonomy for DevOps in the CPS domain. We obtain a generic microservice template that can be used in any kind of CPS. In addition, we instantiate this architecture in the context of an industrial case study from the elevation domain.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA-C52384.2021.00014

Authors: Aitor Gartziandia, Jon Ayerdi, Aitor Arrieta; Shaukat Ali, Tao Yue, Aitor Agirre, Goiuria Sagardui, Maite Arratibel

Title of the source: IEEE 18th International Conference on Architecture Companion

Publisher: IEEE

Relevant pages: 46-53

Year: 2021

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Abstract—The abstract test cases generated through model-based testing (MBT) need to be concretized to make them executable on the software under test (SUT). Multiple researchers proposed different solutions, e.g., by utilizing adapters for concretization of abstract test cases and generation of test scripts. In this paper, we propose our Model-Based Test scrIpt GenEration fRamework (TIGER) based on GraphWalker, an open source MBT tool. The framework is capable of generating test scripts for embedded software controlling functions of a cyber physical system such as passenger trains developed at Bombardier Transportation AB. The framework follows some defined mapping rules for the concretization of abstract test cases. We have evaluated the generated test scripts using an industrial case study in terms of fault detection. We have induced faults in the model of the SUT based on three mutation operators to generate faulty test scripts. The aim of generating faulty test scripts is to produce failed test steps and to guarantee the absence of faults in the SUT. Moreover, we have also generated the test scripts using the correct version of the model and executed it to analyse the behaviour of the generated test scripts in comparison with manually-written test scripts. The results show that the test scripts generated by GW using the proposed framework are executable, provide 100% requirements coverage and can be used to uncover faults at software-in-the-loop simulation level of sub-system testing.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW52544.2021.00041

Authors:Muhammad Nouman Zafar, Wasif Afzal, Eduard Paul Enoiu, Athanasios Stratis , Ola Sellin

Title of the source: The 17th International Workshop on Advances in Model Based Testing

Publisher: IEEE

Relevant pages: 192-198

Year: 2021

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Abstract—Model-based testing (MBT) generates many test cases for validating a system under test against the user-defined requirements. Cloud computing provides powerful resources that can be utilised to execute these many test cases that would otherwise take much resources locally. Other benefits of utilizing cloud-based resources are elastic and on-demand, rapid provisioning and release of new, potentially value-adding services. Although cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) have provided the necessary technologies for successful cloud- based operation, it remains difficult to migrate and hence achieve the realisation of MBT as a service for traditional in-house testing operations, especially for embedded software. In this paper, we present a series of cloud-based architectures powered by AWS and an open-source MBT tool, GraphWalker. These architectures are realized at simulation testing stage for real-world embedded software and particularly cater for online MBT, whereby the model-based tool is deployed as a RESTful web service, accessible through a number of REST API commands. The presented architectures as well as their realization through AWS can be adopted in future for more advanced levels of simulation testing of embedded software.

Authors: Wasif Afzal, Amirali Piadehbasmenj

Title of the source: 9th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things

Publisher: IEEE

Year: 2021

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Abstract—The software of elevators requires maintenance over several years to deal with new functionality, correction of bugs or legislation changes. To automatically validate this software, test oracles are necessary. A typical approach in industry is to use regression oracles. These oracles have to execute the test input both, in the software version under test and in a previous software version. This practice has several issues when using simulation to
test elevators dispatching algorithms at system level. These issues include a long test execution time and the impossibility of re-using test oracles both at different test levels and in operation. To deal with these issues, we propose DARIO, a test oracle that relies on
regression learning algorithms to predict the Qualify of Service of the system. The regression learning algorithms of this oracle are trained by using data from previously tested versions. An empirical evaluation with an industrial case study demonstrates the feasibility of using our approach in practice. A total of five regression learning algorithms were validated, showing that the regression tree algorithm performed best. For the regression tree algorithm, the accuracy when predicting verdicts by DARIO ranged between 79 to 87%.

Authors: Aitor Arrieta, Jon Ayerdi, Miren Illarramendi, Aitor Agirre, Goiuria Sagardui, Maite Arratibel

Title of the source: 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Tests

Publisher: IEEE

Year: 2021

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