István Forgács, PhD is an entrepreneur, a test expert and an author. He is the founder and CEO of 4TestDev. István is the lead author of the book Practical Test Design and Paradigm Shift in Software Testing and the co-author of the Agile Testing Foundations. He is the creator and key contributor of the test-first, codeless test design automation tool Harmony. With his co-author Prof. Attila Kovács, they created a website that is a unique place where testers can exercise test design by executing and improving their tests. With Attila Kovacs, he introduced three test design techniques: combinative testing, action-state testing and general predicate testing.

Model-based testing not only adds the missing test design into the test automation process but also makes test automation faster and more maintainable. A model is more compact than a code and test cases are always regenerated when the model changes. In his presentation „Test design automation – the future has arrived“, István will show the three basic types of MBTs. The first is a stateless solution. Testers can create flowgraphs, UML activity diagrams, BPMN, etc. The problem is that only simple bugs can be detected and coding or inserting constraints is necessary. This is the most widely used solution yet the weakest among the three. The second is state transition testing, where testers can create EFSMs, UML statecharts, etc. This is a better solution as you can apply an appropriate test selection criterion by which even tricky bugs can be detected. The problem is that coding is needed and sometimes the output (some state) should be coded. The third solution, action-state testing eliminates the problems of the two others. István will explain how this method is working and how it eliminates the problems of the other methods. He will also show a tool that implemented action-state testing. To learn more about the three solutions, read this article or find even more in the book István wrote with Attila.