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

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

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

Automatic test case generation from UML state chart diagram: A survey

The need for developing high-quality systems and applications with the minimum faults and error in them has been increased recently.In addition, a question of time and expenses that should be as low as possible always is concerned.Thus, it needs to be updated with the testing techniques that are more structured and automated which are used during the analysis and design phase.The significant role of automated testing techniques is that it helps speeding up the delivery of services of the products to the market with little chances of loss, and increases the software value. If the purpose were to decrease the expenses and getting closer to technology, then testing automation would be a crucial choice.The aim of this survey is to improve the understanding of UML diagram based testing techniques.Test case generation from state chart has been have focused on.Also, classify the various research approaches to their methods. The issues of test coverage associated with these methods have been discussed also

Test Case Generation Based on State and Activity Models

Abstract We propose a novel testing technique for object-oriented programs. Based on the state and activity models of a system, we construct an intermediate representation, which we have named state-activity diagram (SAD). We generate test cases to achieve state-activity coverage of SADs. We have empirically evaluated the effectiveness of our approach. The results show that the proposed technique could detect seeded integration testing faults which could not be detected by the related approaches