Inter-context control-flow and data-flow test adequacy criteria for nesC applications

NesC is a programming language for applications that run on top of networked sensor nodes. Such an application mainly uses an interrupt to trigger a sequence of operations, known as contexts, to perform its actions. However, a high degree of inter-context interleaving in an application can cause it to be error-prone. For instance, a context may mistakenly alter another context's data kept at a shared variable. Existing concurrency testing techniques target testing programs written in general-purpose programming languages, where a small scale of inter-context interleaving between program executions may make these techniques inapplicable. We observe that nesC blocks new context interleaving when handling interrupts, and this feature significantly restricts the scale of inter-context interleaving that may occur in a nesC application. This paper models how operations on different contexts may interleave as inter-context flow graphs. Based on these graphs, it proposes two test adequac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Zhifeng Lai, Shing-Chi Cheung, Wing Kwong Chan
• Keywords: Inter-context Interleaving, Open-source NesC Application, SIGSOFT 2008, Software Engineering, Test Adequacy Criteria