Applying modeling & simulation to the software testing process: one test oracle solution

This paper suggests that the software engineering community could exploit simulation to much greater advantage. There are several reasons for this. First, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has indicated that simulation will play a significant role in the acquisition of defense-related systems to cut costs, improve reliability and bring systems into operation more rapidly. Second, there many areas where simulation can be applied to support software development and acquisition. Such areas include requirements specification, process improvement, architecture trade-off analysis and software testing practices. Third, commercial simulation technology, capable of supporting software development needs is now mature, is easy to use, is of low cost and is readily available. Computer-based simulation at various abstraction levels of the system/software under test can serve as a efficient test oracle, as described in this paper, too. Simulation-based (stochastic) experiments, combined with optimized design-of-experiment plans, in our case study, have shown a minimum productivity increase of 100 times in comparison to current practice without M&S deployment.