RobusTest: Towards a Framework for Automated Testing of Robustness in Software

Paper in proceeding, 2011

Growing complexity of software systems and increasing demand for higher quality systems has resulted in more focus on software robustness in academia and research. By increasing the robustness of a software many failures which decrease the quality of the system can be avoided or masked. When it comes to specification, testing and assessing software robustness in an efficient manner the methods and techniques are not mature yet. This paper presents the idea of a framework RobusTest for testing robustness properties of a system with focus on timing issues. The test cases provided by the framework are formulated as properties with strong links to robustness requirements. These requirements are categorized into patterns as specified in the ROAST framework for specifying and eliciting robustness requirements. The properties are then used for automatically generating robustness test cases and assessing the results.