Software test case generation from system models and specification. Use of the UML diagrams and High Level Petri Nets models for developing software test cases.
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Publication date
2012-06-29Supervisor
Dahal, Keshav P.Hossain, M. Alamgir
Keyword
Software test casesSystem models
Specifications
UML diagrams
High Level Petri Nets models
Software engineering
Software testing
Test data
Model transformation
Institution
University of BradfordDepartment
School of Computing, Informatics and MediaAwarded
2010Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The main part in the testing of the software is in the generation of test cases suitable for software system testing. The quality of the test cases plays a major role in reducing the time of software system testing and subsequently reduces the cost. The test cases, in model de- sign stages, are used to detect the faults before implementing it. This early detection offers more flexibility to correct the faults in early stages rather than latter ones. The best of these tests, that covers both static and dynamic software system model specifications, is one of the chal- lenges in the software testing. The static and dynamic specifications could be represented efficiently by Unified Modelling Language (UML) class diagram and sequence diagram. The work in this thesis shows that High Level Petri Nets (HLPN) can represent both of them in one model. Using a proper model in the representation of the software specifications is essential to generate proper test cases. The research presented in this thesis introduces novel and automated test cases generation techniques that can be used within a software sys- tem design testing. Furthermore, this research introduces e cient au- tomated technique to generate a formal software system model (HLPN) from semi-formal models (UML diagrams). The work in this thesis con- sists of four stages: (1) generating test cases from class diagram and Object Constraint Language (OCL) that can be used for testing the software system static specifications (the structure) (2) combining class diagram, sequence diagram and OCL to generate test cases able to cover both static and dynamic specifications (3) generating HLPN automat- ically from single or multi sequence diagrams (4) generating test cases from HLPN. The test cases that are generated in this work covered the structural and behavioural of the software system model. In first two phases of this work, the class diagram and sequence diagram are decomposed to nodes (edges) which are linked by Classes Hierarchy Table (CHu) and Edges Relationships Table (ERT) as well. The linking process based on the classes and edges relationships. The relationships of the software system components have been controlled by consistency checking technique, and the detection of these relationships has been automated. The test cases were generated based on these interrelationships. These test cases have been reduced to a minimum number and the best test case has been selected in every stage. The degree of similarity between test cases is used to ignore the similar test cases in order to avoid the redundancy. The transformation from UML sequence diagram (s) to HLPN facilitates the simpli cation of software system model and introduces formal model rather than semi-formal one. After decomposing the sequence diagram to Combined Fragments, the proposed technique converts each Combined Fragment to the corresponding block in HLPN. These blocks are con- nected together in Combined Fragments Net (CFN) to construct the the HLPN model. The experimentations with the proposed techniques show the effectiveness of these techniques in covering most of the software system specifications.Type
ThesisQualification name
PhDCollections
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