A test case generation framework based on UML statechart diagram

Early software fault detection offers more flexibility to correct errors in the early development stages. Unfortunately, existing studies in this domain are not sufficiently comprehensive in describing the major processes of the automated test case generation. Furthermore, the algorithms used for test case generation are not provided or well described. Current studies also hardly address loops and parallel paths issues, and achieved low coverage criteria. Therefore, this study proposes a test case generation framework that generates minimized and prioritized test cases from UML statechart diagram with higher coverage criteria. This study, conducted a review of the previous research to identify the issues and gaps related to test case generation, model-based testing, and coverage criteria. The proposed framework was designed from the gathered information based on the reviews and consists of eight components that represent a comprehensive test case generation processes. They are relation table, relation graph, consistency checking, test path minimization, test path prioritization, path pruning, test path generation, and test case generation. In addition, a prototype to implement the framework was developed. The evaluation of the framework was conducted in three phases: prototyping, comparison with previous studies, and expert review. The results reveal that the most suitable coverage criteria for UML statechart diagram are all-states coverage, all-transitions coverage, alltransition-pairs coverage, and all-loop-free-paths coverage. Furthermore, this study achieves higher coverage criteria in all coverage criteria, except for all-state coverage, when compared with the previous studies. The results of the experts’ review show that the framework is practical, easy to implement due to it is suitability to generate the test cases. The proposed algorithms provide correct results, and the prototype is able to generate test case effectively. Generally, the proposed system is well accepted by experts owing to its usefulness, usability, and accuracy. This study contributes to both theory and practice by providing an early alternative test case generation framework that achieves high coverage and can effectively generate test cases from UML statechart diagrams. This research adds new knowledge to the software testing field, especially for testing processes in the model-based techniques, testing activity, and testing tool support

Test data generation from UML state machine diagrams using GAs

Automatic test data generation helps testers to validate software against user requirements more easily. Test data can be generated from many sources; for example, experience of testers, source program, or software specification. Selecting a proper test data set is a decision making task. Testers have to decide what test data that they should use, and a heuristic technique is needed to solve this problem automatically. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating test data from software specifications. The selected specification is Unified Modeling Language (UML) state machine diagram. UML state machine diagram describes a system in term of state which can be changed when there is an action occurring in the system. The generated test data is a sequence of these actions. These sequences of action help testers to know how they should test the system. The quality of generated test data is measured by the number of transitions which is fired using the test data. The more transitions test data can fire, the better quality of test data is. The number of coverage transitions is also used as a feedback for a heuristic search for a better test set. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are selected for searching the best test data. Our experimental results show that the proposed GA-based approach can work well for generating test data for some types of UML state machine diagrams

Safety analysis of software product lines using state-based modeling and compositional model checking

Software product lines are widely used due to their advantageous reuse of shared features while still allowing optional and alternative features in the individual products. In high-integrity product lines such as pacemakers, flight control systems, and medical imaging systems, ensuring that common and variable safety requirements hold as each new product is built or existing products are evolved is key to the safe operations of those systems. However, this goal is currently hampered by the complexity of identifying the interactions among common and variable features that may undermine system safety. This is largely due to (1) the fact that the available safety analysis techniques lack sufficient support for analyzing the combined effects of different features, and (2) existing techniques for identifying feature interactions do not adequately accommodate the presence of common features and results in repeated checking across different products. The work described here addresses the first problem by systematically exploring the relationships between behavioral variations and potential hazardous states through scenario guided executions of the state model over the variations. It contributes to a solution to the second problem by generating formal obligations at the interfaces between features, so that sequentially composed features can be verified in a way that allows reuse for subsequent products. The main contributions of this work are an approach to perform safety analysis on the variations in a product line using state-based modeling, a tool-supported technique that guides and manages the generation of model-checkable properties from product-line requirements, and a formal framework for model checking product-line features that removes restrictions on how the features can be sequentially composed. The techniques and their implementations are demonstrated in the context of a medical-device product line

Automatic model - based test case generation for uml diagrams using tree travelsal algorithm

The foundation of any model-based testing (MBT) with Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagrams is test case generation (TCG) which predicts the expected functionalities of a system under test (SUT). However, problems associated with existing test case generation methods are lack of integration with various UML diagrams and tools, inability to cover all the model elements of UML diagrams, failure to generate comprehensive test cases based on adequate coverage criteria and lack of support tools for automatic generation of test cases. To address these challenges, efficient mapping strategies for model elements that engenders effective artefacts extraction and test case generation processes were proposed. The methodology employed in this research comprised constructing relevant models and algorithms as well as implementing with the use of Java programming language. Specifically, an enhanced elements mapper, artefacts extractor (parser) and test case generator were developed and integrated to produce the support tool. The elements mapper yielded an accuracy result of 99.31%. The artefacts extractor recorded 99.64% accuracy while the test case generator recorded 100% accuracy. The improved methods proved to be more robust and efficiently generated quality test cases with eliminated redundancies based on all the descriptive attributes of UML diagrams. Limitations of existing the methods were addressed in the proposed method which is able to integrate more diagrams to generate quality test cases