Model-Based Test Case Prioritization Using UML Activity Diagram and Design Level Attributes

UML activity and state chart diagrams are the most frequently UML models used for testing a system based on its specifications. Testers may choose different UML diagrams based on comprehensibility criteria. Previous studies, however, highlighted the lack of experts’ evaluation of comprehensibility of activity and state chart diagrams in test case generation. Thus, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the comprehensibility of the UML activity and state chart diagrams based on perspectives of experts. This study generated manual test cases from activity and state chart diagrams and used comprehensibility’s evaluation criteria during interviews with several software testing experts. The results of this study revealed that activity diagrams are more comprehensible than state chart diagrams in test case generation by considering comprehension variables (perceived difficulty and subjective confidence). The results of this study aim to unify the practical efforts of testers to choose MBT diagrams in generating test cases.

Model Based Testing is one of the most critical area to be addressed efficiently to ensure effective testing of the given project. The system implemented combines UML with FSM to cover all scenarios with all possible paths. As Finite Machine also works on the trigger where conditions are framed and if these conditions are satisfied then next action is executed; this phenomenon motivates to build a framework for generating the test cases automatically covering all paths (activity diagram in UML helps to cover all paths) and conditions ( Finite State Machine helps to frame set of conditions). Model Based Testing designed considering all paths and conditions to check all scenarios to generate detailed test cases for given project or application.

Regression testing is the process of testing a modified system using the old test suite. As the test suite size is large, system retesting consumes large amount of time and computing resources. This issue of retesting of software systems can be handled using a good test case prioritization technique. A prioritization technique schedules the test cases for execution so that the test cases with higher priority executed before lower priority. The objective of test case prioritization is to detect fault as early as possible so that the debuggers can begin their work earlier. In this paper we propose a new prioritization technique to prioritize the test cases to perform regression testing for Component Based Software System (CBSS). The components and the state changes for a component based software systems are being represented by UML state chart diagrams which are then converted into Component Interaction Graph (CIG) to describe the interrelation among components. Our prioritization algorithm takes this CIG as input along with the old test cases and generates a prioritized test suit taking into account total number of state changes and total number of database access, both direct and indirect, encountered due to each test case. Our algorithm is found to be very effective in maximizing the objective function and minimizing the cost of system retesting when applied to few JAVA projects.

Because of their structural and semantic inter-dependency, UML diagrams describing a software product must be consistent to ensure the success of the development process. This inter-diagram consistency is often not easy to ensure considering the multi-views the diagrams cover, the different levels of abstraction they encode, and the different development phases during which they are produced. In this paper, we tackle the consistency problem between the functional and dynamic views in behavioral diagrams of software. We propose an approach to detect and localize inter-consistency errors among UML use cases and activity diagrams. This approach is composed of two phases: measurement phase (1) and controlling phase (2). This approach is illustrated and validated through a "Restaurant management system" case study. The proposed approach will help both software designers/developers and quality assurance/testing engineers identifying and localizing the causes of software errors at early phases (specification and design).

This paper deals with a new technique for validating object-oriented software at design phase of project development. There are several modeling diagrams used at design phase of Software Development Life Cycle. But in this paper, we focus on UML Activity Diagram. In our work, first we construct the UML activity diagram for the given system using ArgoUML. Then, the XML (“EXtensible Markup Language”) code is generated for the constructed activity diagram. Next, this XML code is translated to XSD (“XML Schema Definition”) code. This XSD code is given as input to JAXB (“Java Architecture for XML Binding”), which generates the Java template. Then, this Java template is instrumented to a complete Java program with minimal manual effort. Next, we carryout concolic testing of this Java code using jCUTE. This tool generates test cases by taking the Java program as input. Then, the obtained test suite and generated Java source code are inputed into our in-house developed tool named COPECA (COverage PErcentage CAlculator) to calculate MC/DC (Modified Condition/Decision Coverage) score. We have achieved 56.31% MC/DC on doing experiment with fourteen activity diagrams, which is a fair (moderate) achievement compared to the existing work.

Test cases are essential parts to perform software testing as they play very significant role defining the test steps to work. Test cases can be generated either manually or automatically. Creating test cases manually has several disadvantages, such as higher probability in producing inaccurate results. Furthermore, generating test cases manually is ineffective since manual methods will take longer and require high human efforts. Therefore, generating test cases automatically is more preferable to limit the previous problems. Automated testing can also provide more accurate results than manual testing because it is less prone to human errors encouraging software developers to generate test cases automatically. Test cases can be generated from various sources, including UML diagrams. In this paper, we propose a method to generate test cases automatically by utilising depth-first search algorithms. The UML diagram used in this study is an activity diagram. This paper also provides a method to parse activity diagram that is created using the visual paradigm application that has been converted into an XML format. Our method is able to parse and convert the XML format into graph or tree form. Using our proposed method, a test case search will be carried out using the depth-first search on the tree form to generate test cases. Lastly, we also evaluate our method by comparing the generated test cases with cyclomatic complexity, the method will be performed manually and automatically to validate the results of many scenarios. Our result showed that our method could generate the same scenario (100% coverage) as the manual validation method.

A regression test case prioritization (TCP) technique reorders test cases for regression testing to achieve early fault detection. Most TCP techniques have been developed for regression testing of source code in an application. Most web applications rely on a database server for serving client requests. Any changes in the database result in erroneous client interactions and may bring down the entire web application. However, most prioritization techniques are unsuitable for prioritizing test suites for early detection of changes in databases. There are very few proposals in the literature for prioritization of test cases that can detect faults in the database early. We propose a new automated TCP technique for web applications that automatically identifies the database changes, prioritizes test cases related to database changes and executes them in priority order to detect faults early.

Regression testing is an important and costly strategy in software testing. To decrease its cost, many methods have been proposed including the test case prioritization methods. The aim of the prioritization methods is to define an ideal order of test cases that allows for higher coverage and early fault detection with minimal number of executed test cases. However, the problem with most of the existing test case prioritization methods is the random sorting of test cases when two or more test cases record equal priority values. In this paper, the effectiveness of an enhanced weighted method using a unique priority value, UniVal, is proposed. Unival prioritizes test cases based on code coverage criteria with information from history of previous executions. In addition, a controlled experiment was executed, and the results were statistically analyzed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results indicates better performance with regard to prioritize test cases and achieve higher APFD values.  Â

The Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML) aims to become a hub for integrated use of enterprise and information systems (IS) models expressed using different languages. The paper explains how central constructs from UML's class and activity diagrams have been incorporated into UEML. As a result, the semantics of UML's central constructs for representing classes and activities have become more precisely defined in terms of the common UEML ontology. Through their ontology images, the two diagram types are also on the way to become interoperable with other enterprise and IS modelling languages in UEML.

In model-based testing using sequence diagrams, test cases are automatically derived from the sequence diagrams. For the generation of test cases, scenarios need to be found for representing as a sequence diagram, and to extract test paths satisfying the test coverage. However, it is hard to automatically extract test paths from the sequence diagram because a sequence diagram represents loop, opt, and alt information using CombinedFragments. To resolve this problem, we propose a transformation process that transforms a sequence diagram into an activity diagram which represents scenarios as a type of control flows. In addition, we generate test cases from the activity diagram by applying a test coverage concept. Finally, we present a case study for test cases generation from a sequence diagram.

As Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams capture the key system behavior, the UML activity diagram is well suited for the system level testing of systems. In this paper, first an activity flow graph is derived from activity diagram. Then, all the required information is extracted from the activity flow graph (AFG). The activity flow graph (AFG) for the activity diagram is created by traversing the activity diagram from beginning to end, showing choices, conditions, concurrent executions, loop statements. From the graph different control flow sequence are identified by traversing the AFG by depth first traversal technique. Next, an algorithm is proposed to generate all activity paths. Finally, test cases are generated using activity path coverage criteria. Here, a case study on Soft drink Vending Machine (SVM) has been presented to illustrate our approach.

During the various iterations of software development, test case prioritization generally schedules test cases in order to increase test efficiency as soon as possible without reducing the scale of the test. It is noted that currently, many prioritization techniques are usually based on the assumption that the test cases are independent so as to reduce testing effort. However in the actual test, the dependencies and relations exist between the test cases. In this paper, we propose a new type of prioritization technique based on the relationship of dependencies between test cases. We gather the dependency information of a test suite and then put forward a weighted depth-first search algorithm to determine the most effective order. To assess our approach, an academic feasibility study and three industrial experiments are conducted. Evaluation results indicate that our proposed method can be used to improve the fault detection effectiveness when compared with random ordering and some existed prioritization techniques which are based on function coverage.

Dessie Health Science College (DHSC) uses manual process system for the store. When customers need to borrow an item, and return the borrowed item they must go to the office and record what they want manually, that’s way it is making the process too late. Which requires the employee to use paper based recording files to know the status of each customer and to perform the process in the system. The paper includes three chapters or phases. The first phase covers the introduction, which contains background, Existing system study, proposed system, objective of the project, benefits of the project, scope, methodology and significant of the project. The second phase covers the system features which contain existing system description, hardware requirement, software requirement, user requirement, system requirement, functional requirement, non-functional requirement, use case diagram, Use case description, activity diagram and sequence diagram. The third phase covers system design which include Deployment diagram, user interface design, ER diagram and Algorism design.

Test case prioritization techniques schedule test cases in an order that increases their effectiveness in meeting some performance goal. One performance goal, rate of fault detection , is a measure of how quickly faults are detected within the testing process; an improved rate of fault detection can provide faster feedback on the system under test, and let software engineers begin locating and correcting faults earlier than might otherwise be possible. In previous work, we reported the results of studies that showed that prioritization techniques can significantly improve rate of fault detection. Those studies, however, raised several additional questions: (1) can prioritization techniques be effective when aimed at specific modified versions; (2) what tradeoffs exist between fine granularity and coarse granularity prioritization techniques; (3) can the incorporation of measures of fault proneness into prioritization techniques improve their effectiveness? This paper reports the results of new experiments addressing these questions.

Test‐case prioritisation (TCP) attempts to schedule the order of test‐case execution such that faults can be detected as quickly as possible. TCP has been widely applied in many testing scenarios such as regression testing and fault localisation. Abstract test cases (ATCs) are derived from models of the system under test and have been applied to many testing environments such as model‐based testing and combinatorial interaction testing. Although various empirical and analytical comparisons for some ATC prioritisation (ATCP) techniques have been conducted, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no comparative study focusing on the most current techniques has yet been reported. In this study, they investigated 18 ATCP techniques, categorised into four classes. They conducted a comprehensive empirical study to compare 16 of the 18 ATCP techniques in terms of their testing effectiveness and efficiency. They found that different ATCP techniques could be cost‐effective in different testing scenarios, allowing us to present recommendations and guidelines for which techniques to use under what conditions.