Re: [Boost-users] Boost Statechart: general questionss aboutwhatthelibrary can do

From: Andreas Huber (ahd6974-spamgroupstrap_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-13 18:59:26

RIVASSEAU Jean Noel wrote:
> What I am trying to do is:
>
> * I have an embedded software to *test*. I am trying to develop a
> framework for somewhat automatically testing the software. If I look
> at the specification of the software, I have lots of possible states
> (specs mention a lot of UML like diagrams). I need to test if the
> software correctly respects the specification, that is, if it
> correctly changes from one state to another according to a given
> event.
>
> Since the diagrams are complex, and thus the state space is huge
> (sometimes more than 100 states), I'd like for my framework to be
> able to automatically go to a given state, to be able to test the
> software in that particular state. Eg, if you just start by powering
> up the device, I'd like to compute the paths (and thus, events, that
> have to be translated to commands sent to the embedded device) to go
> to a particular state.

In general the library cannot know how many or what states a machine 
consists of (which is a side-effect of the scalability requirements), so 
there's no way how it could compute shortest paths. I still think this 
is more of a BGL problem than anything else. If you model the FSM in BGL 
with appropriate objects attached to edges, it should be fairly 
straight-forward to systematically test the behavior in each state.

HTH & Regards,

-- 
Andreas Huber
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