Title: Automatic scenario-oriented test case generation from UML activity diagrams: a graph transformation and simulation approach

Authors: Abdelkamel Hettab; Allaoua Chaoui; Mohamed Boubakir; Elhillali Kerkouche

Addresses: MISC Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and its Applications, Faculty of NTIC, University Constantine 2, Constantine, Algeria ' MISC Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and its Applications, Faculty of NTIC, University Constantine 2, Constantine, Algeria ' MISC Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and its Applications, Faculty of NTIC, University Constantine 2, Constantine, Algeria ' Department of Computer Science, University of Jijel, Algeria; MISC Laboratory, University Constantine 2, Constantine, Algeria

Abstract: Model-based testing (MBT) is an activity that allows designing and generating test cases from the initial specification of the system under test (SUT). Unified modelling language (UML) is a standard for model-based specifications, while UML-ADs (UML activity diagrams) are usually used for modelling the overall behaviour of systems. This paper presents a graph transformation-based approach to generate automatically scenario-oriented test cases from UML-ADs. To facilitate the test scenario generation process, an intermediate model called extended activity dependency graph (EADG) is proposed. The approach consists of generating EADG models from UML-ADs. Then, test scenarios are generated from the obtained EADG models. This approach also allows testers to validate their proposed test scenarios by applying them on UML-ADs using a graphical simulation. All ideas presented above are implemented using the graph transformation tool AToM³. To this end, two meta-models and three graph grammars are proposed for presenting and generating EADG and test scenarios models, and for performing the graphical simulation. The approach is applied on a case study and experimental results show that our approach has a high rate of fault-detection capability. This approach can detect more defects in complex structures of concurrency and nested loops.

Keywords: automatic test case generation; graph transformation; UML activity diagram; model-based testing; test coverage criteria; AToM³.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAET.2022.122153

International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology, 2022 Vol.16 No.3, pp.379 - 415

Received: 29 Apr 2019
Accepted: 16 Sep 2019
Published online: 11 Apr 2022 *