This paper introduces an approach to apply data flow testing techniques to Abstract State Machines specifications. Since traditional data flow coverage criteria are strictly based on the mapping between a program and its flow graph, they cannot be directly applied to ASMs. In this context we are interested in tracing the flow of data between states in ASM runs as opposed to between nodes in a program’s flow graph. Therefore, we revise the classical concepts in data flow analysis and define them on two levels: the syntactic (rule) level, and the computational (run) level. We also specify a family of ad hoc data flow coverage criteria and introduce a model checking-based approach to generate automatically test cases satisfying a given set of coverage criteria from ASM models.