AGEDIS - General Description

The project consists of three parallel action streams: technology development, application experiments, and technology transfer. The activities within these streams take place in three phases: requirements gathering and definition, prototyping, and production.

In the first phase of AGEDIS, we will study existing software modelling languages - both graphical and textual (e.g. SDL, Murphi, UML, Lotos, SPIN, Z, CSP) - and define a language for modelling with all the requisite constructs for high level modelling of component-based distributed software for the purpose of generating test suites. The language will be chosen with regard to achieving wide acceptability and rapid adoption in European software development centres. Thus the likely course of action will be the choice of an existing language and the definition of extensions to the language to facilitate test generation and coverage analysis.

The second element of the first phase involves two application experiments to be carried out with existing prototype tools provided by the consortium partners. The purpose of these experiments is to evaluate and refine the requirements for the modelling and integrated toolkit. These initial studies will take 4-6 months and include a retest of an existing function in a product (to provide a baseline for measuring success) and a pilot study of a new feature being added to a product.

The second phase involves intensive research and development of a software modelling language, its compiler, and the integration of the tools into a unified test automation environment. This phase will be driven by the requirements generated during the application experiments.

This phase will be punctuated by three application experiments: one with the first version of the unified toolkit and methodology, and two with the final products of the project. The consortium partners will do additional informal application experiments using the AGEDIS tools and methodology to test certain components of the AGEDIS software tools themselves.

The third and final phase of AGEDIS will include the publication of a methodology document, and the final production of test generation and execution tools integrated and improved on the basis of feedback from the second round of application experiments. The project will close with a public seminar including a tutorial on the use of the tools and papers describing the application experiments and their results.

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