To effectively test parts of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems with a state machine character, Model-based Testing (MBT) approach can be taken. In MBT, a system model is created, and test cases are generated automatically from the model, and a number of current strategies exist. In this paper, we propose a novel alternative strategy that concurrently allows us to flexibly adjust the preferred length of the generated test cases, as well as to mark the states, in which the test case can start and end. Compared with an intuitive N-switch coverage-based strategy that aims at the same goals, our proposal generates a lower number of shorter test cases with fewer test step duplications.
Background: Testing IoT software is challenging due to large scale, volume of data and heterogeneity. Testing automation is a much-needed feature in the domain. Aims: The first goal of this research is to explore the requirements and challenges of IoT testing automation. The second goal is to integrate testing automation tools used in commercial software into the IoT context. Method: A systematic literature review is carried out to elicit requirements for testing automation in IoT. A design science approach is followed to build a testing automation tool for IoT applications written in the Node…
The Internet of things (IoT) is increasingly prevalent in domains such as emergency response, smart cities and autonomous vehicles. Simulation plays a key role in the testing of IoT systems, noting that field testing of a complete IoT product may be infeasible or prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific language (DSL) for generating edge-to-cloud simulators. An edge-to-cloud simulator executes the functionality of a large array of edge devices that communicate with cloud applications. Our DSL, named IoTECS, is the result of a collaborative project with an IoT analyt…
Internet of Things (IoT) systems continuously collect a large amount of data from heterogeneous "smart objects" through standardised service interfaces. A key challenge is how to use these data and relevant event logs to construct continuously adapted usage profiles and apply them to enhance testing methods, i.e., prioritization of tests for the testing of continuous integration of an IoT system. In addition, these usage profiles provide relevance weightings to analyse architecture and behaviour of the system. Based on the analysis, testing methods can predict specific system locations that ar…
The recent active development of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in various domains has led to an increased demand for security, safety, and reliability of these systems. Security and data privacy are currently the most frequently discussed topics; however, other reliability aspects also need to be focused on to maintain the smooth and safe operation of IoT systems. Until now, there has been no systematic mapping study dedicated to the topic of interoperability and integration testing of IoT systems specifically; therefore, we present such an overview in this study. We analyze 803 papers fr…
For Internet of Things (IoT) systems operating in areas with limited network connectivity, reliable and safe functionality must be ensured. This can be done using special test cases which are examining system behavior in cases of network outage and restoration. These test cases have to be optimal when approached from the testing effort viewpoint. When approached from the process viewpoint, in the sense that a business process supported by a tested system might be affected by a network outage and restoration, test cases can be automatically generated using a suitable model-based testing (MBT) t…
Contemporary development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology brings a number of challenges in the Quality Assurance area. Current issues related to security, user's privacy, the reliability of the service, interoperability, and integration are discussed. All these create a demand for specific Quality Assurance methodology for the IoT solutions. In the paper, we present the state of the art of this domain and we discuss particular areas of system testing discipline, which is not covered by related work sufficiently so far. This analysis is supported by results of a recent survey we perfo…
The continuous testing of small changes to systems has proven to be useful and is widely adopted in the development of software systems. For this, software is tested in environments that are as close as possible to the production environments. When testing IoT systems, this approach is met with unique challenges that stem from the typically large scale of the deployments, heterogeneity of nodes, challenging network characteristics, and tight integration with the environment among others. IoT test environments present a possible solution to these challenges by emulating the nodes, networks, and…
Quality and reliability metrics play an important role in the evaluation of the state of a system during the development and testing phases, and serve as tools to optimize the testing process or to define the exit or acceptance criteria of the system. This study provides a consolidated view on the available quality and reliability metrics applicable to Internet of Things (IoT) systems, as no comprehensive study has provided such a view specific to these systems. The quality and reliability metrics categorized and discussed in this paper are divided into three categories: metrics assessing the …
This paper presents a learning-based approach to detecting failures in reactive systems. The technique is based on inferring models of multiple implementations of a common specification which are pair-wise cross-checked for equivalence. Any counterexample to equivalence is flagged as suspicious and has to be analysed manually. Hence, it is possible to find possible failures in a semi-automatic way without prior modelling. We show that the approach is effective by means of a case study. For this case study, we carried out experiments in which we learned models of five implementations of MQTT br…
With the rapid growth of the contemporary Internet of Things (IoT) market, the established systems raise a number of concerns regarding the reliability and the potential presence of critical integration defects. In this paper, we present a PatrIoT framework that aims to provide flexible support to construct an effective IoT system testbed to implement automated interoperability and integration testing. The framework allows scaling from a pure physical testbed to a simulated environment using a number of predefined modules and elements to simulate an IoT device or part of the tested infrastruct…
With the rapid growth in the number of IoT devices being added to the network, a major concern that arises is the security of these systems. As these devices are resource constrained, safety measures are difficult to implement on the edge. We propose a novel approach for the detection of IoT device attacks based on the use of formal modeling and mutation testing. Namely, we model the behavior of small IoT devices such as motion sensors and RFID reader as state machines with timeouts. We also model basic IoT attacks; namely, battery draining, sleep deprivation, data falsification, replay, and m…
A critical challenge is to enable IoT application development with minimal effort from various stakeholders involved in the development process. Several approaches to tacking this challenge have been proposed in the fields of wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous and pervasive computing, regarded as precursors to the modern day of IoT. However, although existing approaches provide a wide range of features, stakeholders have specific application development requirements and choosing an appropriate approach requires thorough evaluations on different aspects. To date, this aspect has been inves…
Software effort estimation (SEE) models are typically developed based on an underlying assumption that all data points are equally relevant to the prediction of effort for future projects. The dynamic nature of several aspects of the software engineering process could mean that this assumption does not hold in at least some cases. This study employs three kernel estimator functions to test the stationarity assumption in three software engineering datasets that have been used in the construction of software effort estimation models. The kernel estimators are used in the generation of non-unifor…
Model-based testing is a promising technology for black-box software and hardware testing, in which test cases are generated automatically from high-level specifications. Nowadays, systems typically consist of multiple interacting components and, due to their complexity, testing presents a considerable portion of the effort and cost in the design process. Exploiting the compositional structure of system specifications can considerably reduce the effort in model-based testing. Moreover, inferring properties about the system from testing its individual components allows the designer to reduce th…
Model checking of real-time systems has evolved throughout the years. Recently, the model checker Ecdar, using timed I/O automata, was used to perform compositional verification. However, in order to fully integrate model checking of real-time systems into industrial development, we need a productive and reliable way to test if such a system conforms to its corresponding model. Hence, we present an extension of Ecdar that integrates conformance testing into a new IDE that now features modelling, verification, and testing. The new tool uses model-based mutation testing, requiring only the model…
Automotive engineering is recognized as a combination of software and mechanical engineering due to the ever-increasing number of software-based components in vehicles. Since vehicles have become more sophisticated than before to ensure robustness, testing of automotive electronics is performed in high volume, producing immense test-related data. This study investigates how unstructured and decentralized test-related data from testing of automotive electronics creates issues in decision making during the testing and analysis process of test artifacts by performing an exploratory case-study at …
Microservice architecture is the common choice for developing cloud applications these days since each individual microservice can be independently modified, replaced, and scaled. As a result, application development and operating cloud infrastructure were bundled together into what is now commonly called DevOps. However, with the increasing popularity of the serverless computing paradigm and its several advantages such as no infrastructure management, a pay-per-use billing policy, and on-demand fine-grained autoscaling, there is a growing interest in utilizing FaaS and serverless CaaS technol…
PDPM Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing Jabalpur（PDPM印度信息技术设计与制造学院贾巴尔普尔）
Reducing the effort required to make changes in web services is one of the primary goals in web service projects maintenance and evolution. Normally, functional and non-functional testing of a web service is performed by testing the operations specified in its WSDL. The regression testing is performed by identifying the changes made thereafter to the web service code and the WSDL. In this thesis, we present a tool-supported approach to perform efficient regression testing of web services. By representing a web service as a directed graph of WSDL elements, we identify and gathers the changed po…
