Specify Once Test Everywhere: Analyzing Invariants to Augment Service Descriptions for Automated Test Generation

We present a technique which enables a novel specify once, test everywhere paradigm by exploiting invariants in a reference ontology. In our approach, each service operation is described in an IOPE paradigm: Input, Output, Precondition and Effect. The precondition and effects may refer to the concepts defined in the reference ontology. Our approach augments the service description by creating additional service fault specifications to describe the exceptional behaviors which may arise as a result of invariant violations. This approach frees the service provider from the responsibility of specifying appropriate faults for service operations affected by each invariant. This augmented service operation model can then be used during automated test generation.We describe our invariant analysis technique and present experimental results which justifies the underlying intuition.