BEAT: Better Testing with Game Theory

Funded by: NWO
Duration: June 2014 until June 2018
Contact: Prof.dr. M.I.A. Stoelinga

Summary of the project

Motivation. Testing is an important means to assess and improve the quality of ICT systems. At the same time, testing is costly and time consuming, often consuming 50% of the development budget. The goal of the BEAT project is to improve test effectiveness and efficiency by using mathematical game theory, yielding higher system quality at lower costs.

Approach. Testing is naturally phrased as a game, where the tester tries to find faults, playing against the system-under-test (SUT). Also, testing is by nature an optimization problem, asking for a test suite with maximal impact within a given budget.

Aim of the BEAT project is to develop a model-based testing framework that allows one to automatically derive an optimal test suite for a wide range of optimality criteria, including cost, impact, coverage, and risk.

Scientific challenges are (1) to phrase the model-based test theory in terms of mathematical games, so that test cases coincide with game strategies. (2) to develop game-theoretic strategy synthesis algorithms for test optimization (3) to implement these algorithms in our test tool JTorX and perform quantitative assessment of our framework on realistic case studies.