MPhil Thesis Defence


"A generic timing test framework for multimedia software testing"

By

Mr. Zhendong Xu


Abstract

While multimedia software applications are becoming more and more popular,
few work exists on testing this important class of software, especially
with respect to its temporal properties.  Traditional software testing
techniques mainly deal with functional correctness and cannot be directly
applied to testing timing properties.  In this thesis, a framework is
presented for testing the generic temporal relations of media objects in
distributed multimedia software systems (DMSS).  The temporal relations
are based on Allen's basic binary temporal relations [1] between two
objects, and extended to cover multiple numbers of objects in different
streams. We have developed new techniques for test case generation and
test result analysis based on a distributed tester architecture.
Traditional software testing techniques are mainly concerned with
functional correctness or performance, and rarely deal with temporal
relations that are very important in multimedia applications. Furthermore,
time points are hard to be measured exactly, and in this sense are
non-deterministic and non-reproducible. To tackle this problem, we have
introduced a statistical approach for use in computing test verdicts.
Also we discuss ways to reduce the test effort and suggest guidelines in
coming up with criteria for verdict computation based on the real-time
requirements of the applications. The framework was used to test two
different multimedia client systems: i) DEC HPAS multimedia presentation
system, which is a typical multimedia system supporting W3C's SMIL
standard; ii) HUT X-Smiles system, which is an XML-browser written in
java. To test the effectiveness of the new techniques, several categories
of faults were artificially injected into both systems and tested using
the proposed approach. The results showed that our framework is effective
in detecting timing errors.  The framework and techniques are general and
can be applied to other DMSS with only minor modifications.  Moreover the
test process can be fully automated.


Date:			Thursday, 9 August 2001

Time:			2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:			Room 4333
			Lift 3

Committee Members:		Prof. Samuel Chanson (Supervisor)
			Dr. Gary Chan (Chairman)
			Dr. Mounir Hamdi


**** ALL are Welcome ****