Return to search

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.

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/5453
Date January 2010
CreatorsAlhroob, Aysh M.
ContributorsDahal, Keshav P., Hossain, M. Alamgir
PublisherUniversity of Bradford, School of Computing, Informatics and Media
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis, doctoral, PhD
Rights<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>.

Page generated in 0.018 seconds