Can my test case run on your test plant? A logic-based compliance check and its evaluation on real data

Test automation is adopted by the majority of software and hardware producers since it speeds up the testing phase and allows to design and perform a large bunch of tests that would be hardly manageable in a manual way. When dealing with the testing of hardware instruments, different physical environments have to be created so that the instruments under test can be analyzed in different scenarios, involving disparate components and software configurations. Creating a test case is a time consuming activity: test cases should be reused as much as possible. Unfortunately, when a physical test plant changes or a new one is created, understanding if existing test cases can be executed over the updated or new test plant is extremely difficult. In this paper we present our approach for checking the compliance of a test case w.r.t. a physical test plant characterized by its devices and their current configuration. The compliance check, which is fully automated and exploits a logic-based approach, answers the query “Can the test case A run over the physical configured test plant B”?.