Play to Test

Testing tasks can be viewed (and organized!) as games against nature. We study reachability games in the context of testing. Such games are ubiquitous. A single industrial test suite may involve many instances of a reachability game. Hence the importance of optimal or near optimal strategies for reachability games. One can use linear programming or the value iteration method of Markov decision process theory to find optimal strategies. Both methods have been implemented in an industrial model-based testing tool, Spec Explorer, developed at Microsoft Research.