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A systematic approach to automatically derive test cases from use cases specified in restricted natural languages

  • Simula Research Laboratory
  • Beihang University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In many domains, such as avionics, oil and gas, and maritime, a common practice is to derive and execute test cases manually from requirements, where both requirements and test cases are specified in natural language (NL) by domain experts. The manual execution of test cases is largely dependent on the domain experts who wrote the test cases. The process of manual writing of requirements and test cases introduces ambiguity in their description and, in addition, test cases may not be effective since they may not be derived by systematically applying coverage criteria. In this paper, we report on a systematic approach to support automatic derivation of manually executable test cases from use cases. Both use cases and test cases are specified in restricted NLs along with carefully-defined templates implemented in a tool. We evaluate our approach with four case studies (in total having 30 use cases and 579 steps from flows of events), two of which are industrial case studies from the oil/gas and avionics domains. Results show that our tool was able to correctly process all the case studies and systematically (by following carefully-defined structure coverage criteria) generate 30 TCSs and 389 test cases. Moreover, our approach allows defining different test coverage criteria on requirements other than the one already implemented in our tool.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
EditorsDaniel Amyot, Pau Fonseca i Casas, Gunter Mussbacher
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages142-157
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9783319117423
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event8th International Conference on System Analysis and Modeling: Models and Reusability, SAM 2014 - Valencia, Spain
Duration: 29 Sep 201430 Sep 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8769
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference8th International Conference on System Analysis and Modeling: Models and Reusability, SAM 2014
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period29/09/1430/09/14

Keywords

  • Natural language
  • Restricted test case specification
  • Restricted use case modeling
  • Test case specification
  • Test cases
  • Test generation
  • Transformation and automation
  • Use cases

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