Synthesis of test scenarios using UML activity diagrams

Abstract

Often system developers follow Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams to depict all possible flows of controls commonly known as scenarios of use cases. Hence, an activity diagram is treated as a useful design artifact to identify all possible scenarios and then check faults in scenarios of a use case. However, identification of all possible scenarios and then testing with activity diagrams is a challenging task because several control flow constructs and their nested combinations make path identification difficult. In this paper, we address this problem and propose an approach to identify all scenarios from activity diagrams and use them to test use cases. The proposed approach is based on the classification of control constructs followed by a transformation approach which takes into account any combination of nested structures and transforms an activity diagram into a model called Intermediate Testable Model (ITM). We use ITM to generate test scenarios. With our approach it is possible to generate more scenarios than the existing work. Further, the proposed approach can be directly carried out using design models without any addition of testability information unlike the existing approaches.

UML behavioral model based test case generation

“…For activity diagrams, graph based testing has been explored in [46,51,55]. Kim et al [46] presented an approach to generate test cases from activity diagrams for concurrent constructs.…”

“…These generated test cases are based on an activity path coverage criterion and are used to cover synchronization and loop faults. Nayak and Samanta [55] presented a synthesis method for test scenarios generation from activity diagrams for system level testing. First, an activity diagram is transformed into an intermediate testable model (ITM), which maintains a simple control flow.…”

“…Therefore, researchers have focused on behavioral models to generate test cases. For functional testing, extensive research in recent years has focused on behavioral models, like sequence diagrams [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], state machine diagrams [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] and activity diagrams [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. A few researchers have proposed test case generation approach using more than one behavioral diagram [56][57][58][59][60].…”

Model-based testing using UML activity diagrams: A systematic mapping study

“…Nayak and Samanta [48] claimed that it is difficult to interpret the execution orders of the activities in ADs due to complex dependencies that arise within nested structures. They proposed an approach to transform an AD into a well-formed hierarchical structure, known as Intermediate Testable Model (ITM), which indicates high-level flows of control in the AD.…”

TBFV-M: Testing Based Formal Verification for Sysml Activity Diagrams

“…The advantage of this process is that we can use the existing UML tools to handle the SysML model. Ashalatha Nayak [18] introduced an approach to transform the particular Activity Diagram into a model that can be used for testing, called ITM, based on its structure characteristics. The advantage of using ITM is that it can simplify the process of extracting and analyzing test scenarios based on the coverage criteria.…”