Automating test cases generation

Abstract

The scope of Model-Driven Engineering is not limited to Model-Based Development (MBD), i.e. the generation of code from system models, but involves also Model-Based Testing (MBT), which is the automatic generation of efficient test procedures from corresponding test models. Both MBD and MBT include activities such as model creation, model checking, and use of model compilers for the generation of system/test code. By reusing these common activities, the efficiency of MBT can be significantly improved for those organizations which have already adopted MBD, since one of the major efforts in MBT is the creation of test models. In this work, we propose to exploit modeling activity efforts by deriving test models from system models. In this respect, we present a case study in which the Executable and Translatable UML system models are used for automatically generating test models in the QTronic Modeling Language using horizontal model transformations. In turn, the derived artefacts can be used to produce test cases which result to be appropriate for the system under development.moving to lower levels of abstraction until code is generated; refinement is implemented by transformations over models. A model transformation converts a source model to a target model preserving their conformance to the respective meta-models. When source and target models are at different levels of abstraction, the transformation is referred to as vertical transformation; on the other hand, for horizontal is intended the transformation between two models defined at the same level of abstraction [12].At some point in the transformation chain, a deviation from the standard goal of generating actual code can be taken towards the derivation of test models for model-based testing (MBT) purposes (Fig. 1). Although model-based development (MBD) and MBT