Using Executable Specification and Regression Testing for Broadcast Mechanism of Visual Programming Language on Smartphones

<p class="0abstract">The rapid advancement of mobile computing technology and the rising usage of mobile apps made our daily life more productive. The mobile app should operate all the time bug-free in order to improve user satisfaction and offers great business value to the end user. At the same time, smartphones are full of special features that make testing of apps more challenging. Actually, the quality is a must for successful applications and it cannot be achieved without testing and verification. In this paper, we present the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) methodology and Cucumber framework to automate regression testing of Android apps. Particularly, the proposed methods use the visual programming language for smartphones (Catrobat) as a reference. The Catrobat program scripts communicate via a broadcast mechanism. The objective is to test the broadcast mechanism from different angles and track regression errors as well as specify and diagnose bugs with the help of executable specifications. The results show that the methods are able to effectively reveal deficiencies in the broadcast mechanism, and ensure that the app matches all expectations and needs of end users.</p>

Formal ESL Synthesis for Control-Intensive Applications

Due to the massive complexity of contemporary embedded applications and integrated systems, long effort has been invested in high-level synthesis (HLS) and electronic system level (ESL) methodologies to automatically produce correct implementations from high-level, abstract, and executable specifications written in program code. If the HLS transformations that are applied on the source code are formal, then the generated implementation is correct-by-construction. The focus in this work is on application-specific design, which can deliver optimal, and customized implementations, as opposed to platform or IP-based design, which is bound by the limits and constraints of the preexisting architecture. This work surveys and reviews past and current research in the area of ESL and HLS. Then, a prototype HLS compiler tool that has been developed by the author is presented, which utilizes compiler-generators and logic programming to turn the synthesis into a formal process. The scheduler PARCS and the formal compilation of the system are tested with a number of benchmarks and real-world applications. This demonstrates the usability and applicability of the presented method.