Software testing is any activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its required results. Although crucial to software quality and widely deployed by programmers and testers, software testing still remains an art, due to limited understanding of the principles of software. The difficulty in software testing stems from the complexity of software: we can not completely test a program with moderate complexity. Testing is more than just debugging. The purpose of testing can be quality assurance, verification and validation, or reliability estimation. Testing can be used as a generic metric as well. Correctness testing and reliability testing are two major areas of testing. Software testing is a trade-off between budget, time and quality.

Software testing

Message Sequence Charts are a widely used technique for the visualization of the communications between system components. We present a formal semantics of Basic Message Sequence Charts, exploiting techniques from process algebra. This semantics is based on the semantics of the full language as being proposed for standardization in the International Telecommunication Union.

An algebraic semantics of basic message sequence charts

First‐order logic

Opinion Paper: "So what if ChatGPT wrote it?" Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy

For a system of distributed processes, correctness can be ensured by (statically) checking whether their composition satisfies properties of interest. However, Web services are distributed processes that dynamically discover properties of other Web services. Since the overall system may not be available statically and since each business process is supposed to be relatively simple, we propose to use runtime monitoring of conversations between partners as a means of checking behavioral correctness of the entire Web service system. Specifically, we identify a subset of UML 2.0 sequence diagrams as a property specification language and show that it is sufficiently expressive for capturing safety and liveness properties. By transforming these diagrams to automata, we enable conformance checking of finite execution traces against the specification. We show how our language can be used to specify the specification property system (SPS). We describe an implementation of our approach as part of an industrial system. Finally, we discuss our experience of specifying and monitoring a number of properties from three existing applications.

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Runtime Monitoring of Web Service Conversations

Petri net is a mathematical modeling language used to describe a system graphically. It is a strong language that can be used to represent parallel or concurrent activities in a system. With a Petri net tool, users can view the overall system graphically and edit it with the editor. A Petri net tool can also be used to analyze the performance of the system, generate code, simulate the system and perform model checking on it. A review on twenty Petri net tools in this paper will give the readers an idea on what is a Petri net tool and the main functions of a Petri net tool. This paper can serve as an introduction of twenty Petri net tools to the reader. However, to date, there are many Petri net tools available to be downloaded online. This survey paper aims to compare twenty Petri net tools in different aspect. This is important as users will not have to read the reviews of Petri net tools online one by one. Just be having a look at the discussion provided, readers can determined the best recommended Petri net tools to be used based on their operating systems and the types of Petri net tool to be analyzed. The main purpose of this survey paper is to recommend Petri net tools based on the operating system and the types of Petri net to be analyzed.

A Survey of Petri Net Tools

Chatbot (Chatting Robot) is a computer system that allows human to interact with computers using Natural Human Language. This paper intents to present a technical review of five modern chatbot systems, namely, DeepProbe [27], AliMe [19], SuperAgent [4], MILABOT [21] and RubyStar [12]. Review elements will be covered in two general sections: (1) Architectural design; and (2) Implementation process. Architectural design section will review topics surrounding chatbot’s knowledge domain, response generation, text processing and machine learning model, while implementation section will review dataset usage and evaluation strategy topics for each chatbot’s case study. A summarized table of all reviewed elements is presented at the end of this paper together with discussion on our insight regarding the whole review. This paper will conclude with our view on the future roadmap for modern chatbot design.

Modern chatbot systems: a technical review

Model driven development (MDD) aims to promote the role of modeling in software engineering. Enterprise systems and architectures are often modeled via multiple representations. For example UML models are widely used by the designers to capture various viewpoint of the system; while formal models using languages such as CSP, Z and Petri nets are suitable for the analysis. Model transformation techniques developed as a part of MDD can be applied to generate one model from another model automatically. This allows benefiting from the tools and techniques developed and used in multiple languages. This paper presents a method of applying MDD model transformation from UML 2.0 sequence diagrams to Petri nets. The paper shows that the model transformation results in free choice Petri nets. As a result, the low complexity of analysis and the synthesis techniques can be applied to the models of enterprise systems which are captured in UML sequence diagrams.

A Model Driven Approach to Represent Sequence Diagrams as Free Choice Petri Nets

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rza/pub/modelInter.pdf

Model interoperability via Model Driven Development

The need for a design language that is rigorous but accessible and intuitive is often at odds with the formal and mathematical nature of languages used for analysis. UML and Petri Nets are a good example of this dichotomy. UML is a widely accepted modelling language capable of modelling the structural and behavioural aspects of a system. However UML lacks the mathematical foundation that is required for rigorous analysis. Petri Nets on the other hand have a strong mathematical base that is well suited for analysis of a system but lacks the appeal and ease-of-use of UML. Design in UML languages such as Sequence Diagrams and analysis in Petri Nets require on one hand some expertise in potentially two incompatible systems and their tools, and on the other a seamless transition from one system to the other. One way of addressing this impediment is to focus the software development mainly on the design language system and to facilitate the transition to the formal analysis by means of a combination of automation and tool support. The aim of this paper is to present a transformation system, which takes UML Sequence Diagrams augmented with time constraints and generates semantically equivalent Petri Nets that preserve the timing requirements. A case study on a small network is used in order to illustrate the proposed approach and in particular the design, the transformation and the analysis processes.

/pdf/a-model-driven-approach-to-the-analysis-of-timeliness-ytyj5lwyxx.pdf

Mohamed Ariff Ameedeen

Papers

A Survey of Petri Net Tools

Modern chatbot systems: a technical review

A Model Driven Approach to Represent Sequence Diagrams as Free Choice Petri Nets

Model interoperability via Model Driven Development

A Model Driven Approach to the Analysis of Timeliness Properties