Passive Testing With Proxy-Testers

Passive testing is an alternative testing approach whose purpose is to passively analyze an implementation behaviour without disturbing it. Usually, passive testing methods extract traces by means of sniffer-based tools, running in the same environment as the implementation. Nevertheless, many implementation environments prevent from setting a sniffer-based tool for security or technical reasons. The authors propose a passive testing method based on the notion of proxy-tester which represents an intermediary between client applications and the implementation.