Title: Software semantics and syntax as a tool for automated test generation

Authors: Nadia Nahar; Kazi Sakib

Addresses: Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh ' Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract: Test automation saves time and cost by digitising test generation and execution. The existing techniques fail to produce effective and compliable test scripts for not considering both syntactic and semantic information. The proposed three-layer architecture incorporates these information for generation of proper test scripts. It analyses the source code for extracting syntax and UML diagrams for obtaining semantics. Class methods and sequence of calls are extracted from UMLs, and syntax for class instantiations and method calls are accumulated from source code to generate unit and integration tests. A case study as well as experiments, conducted on sample Java projects, conform the competence of the generation process along with the generated test scripts.

Keywords: software testing; test automation; automatic test generation; unit testing; integration testing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCCBS.2017.089987

International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems, 2017 Vol.7 No.4, pp.369 - 396

Accepted: 02 Oct 2017
Published online: 26 Feb 2018 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article