Automatic generation of system test cases from use case specifications

Abstract

In safety critical domains, system test cases are often derived from functional requirements in natural language (NL) and traceability between requirements and their corresponding test cases is usually mandatory. The definition of test cases is therefore time-consuming and error prone, especially so given the quickly rising complexity of embedded systems in many critical domains. Though considerable research has been devoted to automatic generation of system test cases from NL requirements, most of the proposed approaches require significant manual intervention or additional, complex behavioral modelling. This significantly hinders their applicability in practice.In this paper, we propose Use Case Modelling for System Tests Generation (UMTG), an approach that automatically generates executable system test cases from use case specifications and a domain model, the latter including a class diagram and constraints. Our rationale and motivation are that, in many environments, including that of our industry partner in the reported case study, both use case specifications and domain modelling are common and accepted practice, whereas behavioural modelling is considered a difficult and expensive exercise if it is to be complete and precise. In order to extract behavioral information from use cases and enable test automation, UMTG employs Natural Language Processing (NLP), a restricted form of use case specifications, and constraint solving.

Detecting Logical Inconsistencies by Clustering Technique in Natural Language Requirements

“…Masuda2015 used natural-language processing to identify the logical pattern "If (A) is (B), (C) is (D)" in sentences [2], but did not identify conditions or actions. There are also linguistic studies on use cases [10] and test case generation [13]. Sneed2007 made test cases from requirements described in natural language [11].…”

A Method to Specify Software Functional Requirements for System Test Case Generation

“…The authors of [5] specified use case in a language named Restricted Use Case Modeling (RUCM). RUCM is defined based on a template containing a set of restriction rules in the natural language.…”

“…Some of these researches do not consider these parameters, while others, such as [5], require using a complex extraction to extract the parameters from the OCL expressions. Further, there are no researches that propose to specify exactly the allowed maximum repeated times of an action.…”

Configuring use case models in product families

“…Further, for PL use case specifications, we employ Restricted Use Case Modeling (RUCM) [79], which includes a template and restriction rules to reduce imprecision and incompleteness in use cases. RUCM was a clear choice since it reduces ambiguity and facilitates automated analysis of use cases [78,80,73,74]. However, since it was not originally meant to model variability, we introduced some PL extensions to capture variability in use case specifications [44].…”