In 2008 UniTESK technology was widely used for creation of test suites for standard conformance testing. The following projects were the biggest ones.

• Linux Standard Base conformance test suite development and maintenance.
• Test development for POSIX-compliant real time operating system.
• Test development for embedded systems meeting the requirements of ARINC-653.

UniTESK tools development was targeted to support of the projects listed and overall quality improvement.

The research in the following directions was conducted: theoretic foundations of testing, test development automation methods for telecommunication protocols and distributed software, testing methods for pipelined microprocessors and their units, test construction methods for mathematical libraries. The project on Linux driver verification toolset was going on.

3 of our colleagues have upheld theses this year.

• I. B. Burdonov — Doctor of Science degree on the theme «Conformance theory for functional model-based software testing».
• V. V. Rubanov — PhD degree on the theme «Automation of toolset construction for software development for extensible embedded systems».
• A. S. Kamkin — PhD degree on the theme «Pipelined microprocessor simulation testing automation method based on formal specifications».

The book of I. B. Burdonov, A. S. Kossatchev, and V. V. Kuliamin «Conformance testing theory for systems with refused inputs and forbidden actions» concerning theoretical foundations of distributed system testing was also published in 2008.

Talks on results of research and projects conducted were given on the following conferences and workshops.

• EclipseCon 2008
• Cybernetics and High Technologies of XXI Century
• SYRCoSE 2008
• FATES/TESTCOM 2008
• DATE 2008
• Methods and Tools of Information Security Assurance
• 5-th Protva Conference of Free Software Developers
• 6-th IEEE East-West Design & Test Workshop
• Open?ert 2008
• ISOLA 2008
• 15-?? International Conference on Contemporary Problems of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
• SITOP 2008
• SECR 2008
• 4-th International Conference SQA Days 2008, Minsk
• 51-st Scientific Conference of MPTI
• AgileDays

The new version 2.2 of JavaTESK tool supporting UniTESK test development for Java software is released.

The main changes are:

• Modelling of asynchronous interactions made more flexible.
  User-defined channel identifiers for model events are introduced.
• Integration of JavaTESK with Eclipse platform improved.
  Outline View for specification extention of Java is implemented.
  It's possible for system under test to be in other Eclipse project.
• Many bugs fixed.

JavaTESK 2.2 can be downloaded on the Downloads page.

A whitepaper is published describing the directions and achievements of the UniTESK Lab in Open International Standards study and refinement.

The whitepaper “Working with Open International Standards” describes the directions and achievements of UniTESK Lab projects related to Open International Standards. The whitepaper  presents projects on several directions: conformance test suites development, standards study, analysis and refinement, infrastructure development to support standard creation, development of prototypes and implementations of international standards. The whitepaper contains a table that summarizes UniTESK Lab experience in the field of Open International standards.
Full text of the paper in PDF.

The paper is published describing the directions and achievements of UniTESK Lab in software testing for embedded avionics systems.

The paper “Testing of software for embedded avionics systems” formulates the main objectives of requirements-based testing as applied to software for embedded avionics systems with rigid fail-safety requirements. It presents the experience and results of creation of conformance test suites for two main standards implemented in real-time operating systems for avionics: ARINC-653 and POSIX. It also proposes the directions and methods of application of the UniTESK technology and the FOREST process to support the software testing process for avionics systems as imposed by the DO-178B standard. The proposed approach is to simplify software certification according to this standard.
Full text of the paper in PDF.

Researchers of the UniTESK Lab studied UniTESK feasibility to connection-oriented protocol conformance testing. The study is based on a “minimal” connection-oriented protocol ABRACADABRA.

The study demonstrated feasibility of UniTESK to conformance testing of conection-oriented protocols. The UniTESK Lab researchers developed a formal specification of the protocol and a test scenario that performs conformance testing of ABRACADABRA implementations.

The Second Spring Young Researchers’ Colloquium on Software Engineering (SYRCoSE 2008) held 29-30 May, 2008 in Saint-Petersburg.

The event was organized by Saint-Petersburg State University (SPbSU) and Institute for System Programming of RAS (ISPRAS) with support of Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR).

Chairs of SYRCoSE are professor A.K. Petrenko (UniTESK Lab., ISPRAS) and professor A.N. Terekhov (SPbSU). About 20 talks, presented by the researchers from different universities and institutes, were done on the colloquium. Their topics include industrial software engineering, safety and security, functional verification, test generation, and others.

More detailed information on the colloquium is available on the web-site http://syrcose.ispras.ru.

• Full integration of CTESK tool in Eclipse+CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) IDE.
• Advanced facilities of test coverage definition and achieved coverage acquisition.
• The run-time support library implementation in C to improve the compatiblility of the binary library files with diffrenet versions of gcc compiler.
• Improved support of C programming language and its gcc extensions by the translator of specifications.
• Significant improvement of tools's speed and stability especially for large test suites.

On March 17-20 EclipceCon 2008 conference was held in Santa Clara, CA, USA. The conference spans the breadth and depth of the Eclipse ecosystem. It is the place for discussions of the current state and future directions of the Eclipse platform.

Sergey Gomanuyk and Alexey Khoroshilov, researches from UniTESK Lab, took part in the conference and presented the short talk «Towards common language toolkit for IDE development». The talk introduces a common toolkit for development an extensible IDE for one or several programming languages. The participants showed interest in the approach proposed.

Also members of UniTESK Lab discussed potential directions for UniTESK testing tools integration into such Eclipse projects as CDT, JDT, TPTP, and OSEE. Eclipse committers provide a valuable feedback on current issues and future ideas.