SALT-an integrated environment to automate generation of function tests for APIs

Automation of test design during the function testing phase is essential both to reduce the substantial cost of testing and to improve the delivered software reliability. We argue for a model based approach specifically designed from a test perspective to automate test design. We describe features of the Specification and Abstraction Language for Testing (SALT) environment which embodies this perspective. SALT allows testers to capture relationships among partitions of input and output variables for a function under test. The tester can also specify (potential) updates to context which result from the function invocation. This context enables the generation of sequences of function invocations with expected outputs. These test specifications along with a fault model, allow generation of an optimized set of test variations. We describe an example to illustrate SALT usage and report results of our pilot study using SALT.