The paper “Schema-guided  Testing of Message-oriented Systems“, by Alcino Cunha and Nuno Macedo, researchers at School of Engineering of the UMinho and INESC TEC, and André Santos, engineer at CoLAB VORTEX, was the winner of the Best Paper Award at the 17th edition of the international conference ENASE – Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering.

This paper presents a method, and respective tool, for testing systems based on communication via message-passing, for example, in autonomous vehicles. From properties written in a high-level language, this method can automatically generate a large number of tests, with different parameters, to apply on a given system – namely robotic systems developed with Robot Operating System (ROS).

The innovative aspect of the paper stems from combining different test generation techniques into one, thus providing an automatic generation method for a type of systems that is known to be difficult to test. In addition, it takes into account the users’ experience, by facilitating the method with a language that’s clearer considering the properties they wish to test.

The method developed by researchers at High-assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) can be used to test certain types of properties on any message-based system, as robots normally are. In practical terms, one can, for instance, test if the controller of a robot or self-driving car sends a stop message to the motor as soon as it receives a sensor message that signals any close obstacle.

The ENASE conference, organised by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), took place online on April 25 and 26.

The EEUM researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC, UMinho and UP-FEUP.