Generic Model for Test Case Generation from both UML Diagrams and Requirements

Abstract

Software testing is accounted to be an important phase in software development life cycle in terms of cost and manpower. It is considered the key to success of any software. Consequently, many studies have been conducted to minimize the associated cost and human effort to fix bugs and errors, and to improve the quality of the testing process by generating test cases at early stages. There exist many software development models, as waterfall model, agile model, etc. Test cases can be generated at different phases (analysis phase, design phase and after development phase). Though, test cases generation at early stages is more effective rather than that after development, where time and effort used for finding and fixing errors and bugs are less than that after development. At a later stage, fixing errors results in enormous code correction, consuming a lot of time and effort. Requirements-based testing is a testing approach in which test cases are derived from the requirements. Requirements represent the initial phase in software developments life cycle. Requirements are considered the basis of any software project. Therefore, any ambiguity in natural language requirements leads to major errors in the coming phases. Moreover, poorly defined requirements may cause software project failure. Model-based testing (MBT) is the automatic generation of software test procedures, using models (UML diagrams) of system requirements and behavior. Whilst Search Based Software Testing (SBST) is a branch of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), in which optimization algorithms are used to automate the search for test data that maximizes the achievement of test goals, while minimizing testing costs. However, most of related studies considered only one type of behavioral diagrams with a lot of human intervention.