Minimal TestCase Generation for Object-Oriented Software with State Charts

Today statecharts are a de facto standard in industry for modeling system behavior. Test data generation is one of the key issues in software testing. This paper proposes an reduction approach to test data generation for the state-based software testing. In this paper, first state transition graph is derived from state chart diagram. Then, all the required information are extracted from the state chart diagram. Then, test cases are generated. Lastly, a set of test cases are minimized by calculating the node coverage for each test case. It is also determined that which test cases are covered by other test cases. The advantage of our test generation technique is that it optimizes test coverage by minimizing time and cost. The present test data generation scheme generates test cases which satisfy transition path coverage criteria, path coverage criteria and action coverage criteria. A case study on Railway Ticket Vending Machine (RTVM) has been presented to illustrate our approach.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 3-4 tables; International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA), Vol.3, No.4, July 2012. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1206.037

Karar tablosu destekli olay sıra çizgeleri temelli sınama durum üretim aracı

10th Turkish National Software Engineering Symposium, UYMS 2016; Canakkale; Turkey; 24 October 2016 through 26 October 2016Model temelli sınama alanında otomatik sınama durum üretimi önemli konuların başında gelir. Otomatik sınama durum üretimi için formel bir modelleme yöntemi ile üretim için algoritmalar gereklidir. Bu bildirinin ilk yazarının geliştirdiği Olay Sıra Çizgeleri (İng. Event Sequence Graphs) formel modelleme yöntemi ve sınama durum üretim algoritmaları, bu bildirinin diğer yazarları tarafından karar tabloları destekli şekilde genişletilmiştir. Ortaya konan modelleme yöntemi ve algoritmalar kodlanarak bir sınama durum üretim aracı 2008 yılından beri geliştirilmektedir. Anılan araç birçok çalışmada kullanılmış ve bu çalışmaların anlatıldığı yayınlarda bu araçtan söz edilmiştir. Bu bildiride karar tabloları destekli olay sıra çizgeleri temelli sınama durum aracının son durumu tanıtılmış ve anılan araç ile bir örnek çalışma sergilenmiştir

An evaluation on the comprehensibility of UML activity and state chart diagrams with regard to manual test generation

The activity and state chart diagrams are the most frequently used UML diagrams for testing a system based on its specification. One of the key important qualities of the UML diagrams is their comprehensibility. The content analysis of previous studies highlighted the lack of experts’ evaluation of the comprehensibility of activity and state chart diagrams with regard to test case generation. Thus, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the comprehensibility of the UML activity and state chart diagrams for test case generation. First, a content analysis was performed to identify the comprehensibility criteria. The criteria are perceived difficulty and subjective confidence. Next, a set of evaluation questions was designed based on the content analysis. Then, test cases were generated from activity and state chart diagrams manually of an adapted case study. An interview was conducted with five experts to validate the evaluation questions. The experts evaluated the comprehensibility of the activity and state chart diagrams by using the evaluation questions. The result of the study provided specific details of the different characteristics of activity and state chart diagrams. Further, it suggested that the activity diagram is more comprehensible than the state chart diagram in the aspect of test case generation. The finding of this study could assist software testers in choosing the appropriate UML diagrams for software testing

Test Case Generation Model for UML Diagrams

The complexity and size of software have been sequentially increasing, and the scope of testing is expanding. To insure deadline delivery and decrease development test cost, the efficiency of software testing needs to be improved. Several approaches for automated test case generation have been proposed over the last few years. However, models for automated test case generation for unified modeling language (UML) diagrams are still in the early stage of development. UML is the most widely used language to describe software analysis and design. Given that test cases can be efficiently derived from UML models, the generation of test cases from UML diagrams has attracted increasing research attention. However, no model currently exists for mapping the generation procedure. This paper proposes a model for automatic test case generation from UML diagrams

Coverage criteria for UML state chart diagram in model-based testing

Software testing is a necessary and essential part of the software quality process and plays a major role in detecting errors in systems. To improve the effectiveness of test case generation during software testing, and with the growing adoption of UML by software developers and researchers, many studies have focused on the automation of test case generation from UML diagrams. One of these diagrams is the UML state chart diagram. These test cases are generally generated to achieve certain coverage criteria. However, combinations of multiple criteria are required to achieve better coverage. Different studies use various number and type of coverage criteria in their methods and approaches. This paper reviews previous studies to present the most practical coverage criteria combinations for UML state chart diagram, including all-states, all-transitions, all-transition-pairs and all-loop-free-paths coverage. A special calculation is necessary to determine the coverage percentage of the proposed coverage criteria. This paper presents a calculation method to achieve this goal with an example is applied to a UML state chart diagram. This finding would be beneficial in the area of automatic test case generating for model-based testing and especially in the UML state chart diagram

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

Model Checking and Model-Based Testing : Improving Their Feasibility by Lazy Techniques, Parallelization, and Other Optimizations

This thesis focuses on the lightweight formal method of model-based testing for checking safety properties, and derives a new and more feasible approach. For liveness properties, dynamic testing is impossible, so feasibility is increased by specializing on an important class of properties, livelock freedom, and deriving a more feasible model checking algorithm for it. All mentioned improvements are substantiated by experiments