Incrementally Discovering Testable Specifications from Program Executions

The Pro Test project(1) is an EU FP7 project to develop techniques that improve the testing and verification of concurrent and distributed software systems. One of the four main work packages is concerned with the automated identification of specifications that could serve as a suitable basis for testing; this is currently a tedious and error-prone manual task that tends to be neglected in practice. This paper describes how this problem has been addressed in the Pro Test project. It describes a technique that uses test executions to refine the specification from which they are generated. It shows how the technique has been implemented and applied to real Erlang systems. It also describes in detail the major challenges that remain to be addressed in future work.