Keynote

Dijkstra has been frequently quoted as saying “Testing can be quite effective for showing the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence”. This remark has often been used by the software engineering community to indicate a dichotomy between testing and verification. From practitioners’ point of view, however, there is not much difference in the ways testing and verification techniques may be used in practice. While engineers would try to demonstrate that their systems are correct (verification), they might find themselves in a situation where they have to prioritize bug finding (testing). As a result, the choice to go for formal verification versus testing is largely driven by the practical needs and the context specificities. In this keynote, I will focus on search-based testing and review some recent research that combines ideas from the search-based testing and the formal verification communities to improve the analysis of models of cyber physical systems (CPS). I will present an empirical study comparing CPS model testing and verification, a search-based testing approach for compute-intensive CPS models that adopt a well-known formal verification framework, and automated generation of formal environment assumptions for CPS models using search-based testing and genetic programming.