14344981
Mutation operators for Object-Z specification
As a powerful means of measuring a test set, mutation testing has been applied to program-based testing for a long time. However, with the development of formal specification technique, the formal specifications also play an important role in software testing. For measuring the quality of the specification-based test cases, researchers provide some mutation operators for the logic predicates. With the emergence of the object-oriented formal specifications, these mutation operators cannot completely model the faults arise in an object-oriented specification and from the misunderstanding of the specification. This paper investigates the faults that may occur in the object-oriented specifications, and gives a set of mutation operators for the Object-Z specifications to model these faults. These mutation operators provide an approach to measuring specification-based test cases and validating the Object-Z specifications.
17865149
A framework for specification-based class testing
Class testing is the base of object-oriented software testing. It involves three aspects: testing each method, testing the relations among class methods and testing the inheriting relation between class and subclass. Rather than concerning the whole class testing process, most specification-based class testing focuses on the methods of generating test cases from the class specification. As a result, the class testing process and test cases cannot be unified and managed in a consistent and convenient way. This paper introduces a test class framework (TCF) that is used to structure the test cases and test deriving process of the class under testing. This framework clearly denotes the process of deriving test cases and test suites from a class specification. It facilitates the construction and management of test cases. Object-Z notation is used to express the framework and class specification.
35610063
A Specification-Based Approach to Testing Polymorphic Attributes
The object-oriented features, such as aggregation, inheritance and polymorphism, facilitate software reuse and improve software quality. But those features also cause new problems that traditional testing techniques cannot resolve effectively. Existing researches on object-oriented software testing are mainly based on some graph representations and seldom consider the combinational effect of aggregation, inheritance and polymorphism. For some model-based specifications that do not include graph representations, it is difficult to use the graph based testing techniques to derive test cases. This paper provides an approach to deriving test cases for testing the combinational effect of aggregation, inheritance and polymorphism from a model-based class specification. This approach contains two techniques at intra-class and inter-class testing levels and is mechanized using the algorithms presented in this paper. Finally, through the experimental analysis, we present the effectiveness and applicability of our testing approach.
4673942
XPACK: A High-Performance WEB Document Encoding
XML is an increasingly popular data storage and exchange format whose popularity can be attributed to its self-describing syntax, acceptance as a data transmission and archival standard, strong internationalization support, and a plethora of supporting tools and technologies. However, XML’s verbose, repetitive, text-oriented document specification syntax is a liability for many emerging applications such as mobile computing and distributed document dissemination. This paper presents XPack, an efficient XML document compression system that exploits information inherent in the document structure to enhance compression quality. Additionally, the utilization of XML structure features in XPack’s design should provide valuable support for structure-aware queries over compressed documents. Taken together, the techniques employed in the XPack compression scheme provide a foundation for efficiently storing, transmitting, and operating over Web documents. Initial experimental results demonstrate that XPack can reduce the storage requirements for Web documents by up to 20% over previous XML compression techniques. More significantly, XPack can simultaneously support operations over the documents, providing up to two orders of magnitude performance improvement for certain document operations when compared to equivalent operations on unencoded XML documents.
15374600
Guest Editors' Introduction: Sensor-Network Applications
Wireless sensor network technologies let us view and access large parts of the physical world from cyberspace via sensor monitoring. The three theme features in this issue address some of the challenges inherent to developing and fielding wireless sensor networks.
17135780
Polymorphic reuse mechanisms for object-oriented database specifications
A polymorphic approach to the incremental design and reuse of object-oriented methods and query specifications is presented. Using this approach, the effort required for manually reprogramming methods and queries due to schema modifications can be avoided or minimized. The salient features of of our approach are the use of propagation patterns and a mechanism for propagation pattern refinement. Propagation patterns can be employed as an interesting specification formalism for modeling operational requirements in object-oriented database systems. They encourage the reuse of operational specifications against the structural modification of an object-oriented schema. Propagation pattern refinement is suited for the specification of reusable operational modules, and for achieving reusability of propagation patterns towards the operational requirement changes.<<ETX>>
9444422
A Systematic Approach to Flexible Specification, Composition, and Restructuring of Workflow Activities
We introduce the ActivityFlow specification language for flexible specification, composition, and coordination of workflow activities. The most interesting features of the ActivityFlow specification language include: (1) a collection of specification mechanisms, allowing workflow designers to use a uniform workflow specification interface to describe different types (i.e., ad-hoc, administrative, or production) of workflows involved in their organizational processesâ€“ this feature helps to increase the flexibility of workflow processes in accommodating various types of changes; (2) a set of activity modeling facilities, enabling workflow designers to describe the flow of work declaratively and incrementally, allowing to reason about correctness and security of complex workflow activities independently from their underlying implementation mechanisms; (3) an open architecture that supports user interaction as well as collaboration of workflow systems of different organizations, and a set of workflow activity restructuring operators to respond to dynamic changes of workflow activities. We end the paper with a series of simulation-based experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of these restructuring operators and the implementation architecture of the ActivityFlow system.
38207892
On the Relations Between Arboricity and Independent Number Or Covering Number
In this paper, the following results are obtained: a(G) + β(G) ⩽ p + 1, ⌈p2⌉ ⩽ a(G)β(G), ⌈p2⌉ ⩽ a′(G) + gb′(G) ⩽ pa′(G) + α′(G) ⩽ 2⌈p2⌉ (δ ⩽ 1) and all bounds are sharp, where p = ¦V(G)¦, ⌈x⌉ denotes the smallest integer greater than or equal to x, a(G) is the vertex arboricity, a′(G) is the edge arboricity, α′(G) is the edge covering number, β(G) is the vertex independent number, β′(G) is the edge independent number, and δ is the minimum degree of G.