Data-driven Mutation Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems

in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (in press)

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) typically consist of a wide set of integrated, heterogeneous components; consequently, most of their critical failures relate to the interoperability of such components ... [more ▼]

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) typically consist of a wide set of integrated, heterogeneous components; consequently, most of their critical failures relate to the interoperability of such components. Unfortunately, most CPS test automation techniques are preliminary and industry still heavily relies on manual testing. With potentially incomplete, manually-generated test suites, it is of paramount importance to assess their quality. Though mutation analysis has demonstrated to be an effective means to assess test suite quality in some specific contexts, we lack approaches for CPSs. Indeed, existing approaches do not target interoperability problems and cannot be executed in the presence of black-box or simulated components, a typical situation with CPSs. In this paper, we introduce data-driven mutation analysis, an approach that consists in assessing test suite quality by verifying if it detects interoperability faults simulated by mutating the data exchanged by software components. To this end, we describe a data-driven mutation analysis technique (DaMAT) that automatically alters the data exchanged through data buffers. Our technique is driven by fault models in tabular form where engineers specify how to mutate data items by selecting and configuring a set of mutation operators. We have evaluated DaMAT with CPSs in the space domain; specifically, the test suites for the software systems of a microsatellite and nanosatellites launched on orbit last year. Our results show that the approach effectively detects test suite shortcomings, is not affected by equivalent and redundant mutants, and entails acceptable costs. [less ▲]

ThEodorE: a Trace Checker for CPS Properties

in Companion Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (2021, May)

ThEodorE is a trace checker for Cyber-Physical systems (CPS). It provides users with (i) a GUI editor for writing CPS requirements; (ii) an automatic procedure to check whether the requirements hold on ... [more ▼]

ThEodorE is a trace checker for Cyber-Physical systems (CPS). It provides users with (i) a GUI editor for writing CPS requirements; (ii) an automatic procedure to check whether the requirements hold on execution traces of a CPS. ThEodorE enables writing requirements using the Hybrid Logic of Signals (HLS), a novel, logic-based specification language to express CPS requirements. The trace checking procedure of ThEodorE reduces the problem of checking if a requirement holds on an execution trace to a satisfiability problem, which can be solved using off-the-shelf Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers. This artifact paper presents the tool support provided by ThEodorE. [less ▲]