A new approach in feature interaction testing

✍ Scribed by Masahide Nakamura; Tohru Kikuno

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 252 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-9260
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-9260(98)00029-7

✦ Synopsis

Feature Interaction (FI) is known as a kind of inconsistent conflicts between new and existing services on the telecommunication networks. In order to detect and eliminate FI, FI testing is needed which checks whether FI occurs or not for given multiple services. In this paper, we first introduce practical examples of FI and then formulate FI testing problem using finite state machine. Next, we review the conventional testing methods. Since the conventional methods generally utilize exhaustive state enumeration for the testing, thus so-called state explosion problem becomes a bottleneck for the testing. To avoid this, we propose a new approach by means of P-invariants of Petri net. Theoretically, the P-invariant method provides only necessary condition for FI testing. However, experimental result shows that it essentially works as necessary and sufficient condition for practical services, and that it realizes much more efficient testing than the conventional ones. Therefore, the proposed approach is well applicable to practical FI testing. 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.