A software traceability approach to support requirement based test coverage analysis

Abstract

Requirement based test coverage (RBTC) is an important deliverable of a software testing process. There are problems in the process whereby the current RBTC analysis does not integrate with the black and white testing types nor does it generate a multi-direction RBTC analysis report. This research aims to address the problems by investigating RBTC analysis using software traceability and review its usefulness and efficiency. Initially, literature review on the comparison of the existing test coverage approaches and software was conducted followed by the development of a prototype using Java and MySQL. The prototype took into consideration the problems of RBTC analysis and this proposed concept which is RBTC Analysis using software traceability approach was modeled and constructed into a prototype called GRAYzer. Software artifacts from a bank project called ‘Fleet Management System’ (FMS) were used and embedded into the prototype. Questionnaires and feedback from FMS expert users of the prototype were collected. Data collected include the usefulness rating and time taken by the FMS experts and GRAYzer to do the RBTC analysis. A descriptive analysis of the data showed that a majority of the FMS experts rated the prototype as “Very Useful” and indicated that GRAYzer provided an efficient RBTC analysis. When compared to the test coverage approaches, the prototype provided a forward and backward test coverage analysis which can be used as analysis for any given artifact type. Besides that, it has also integrated gray box coverage types and multi-directions for the RBTC analysis. The research has shown that a software manager could use the prototype to quantify the effort needed by a team member and as a means to visualize the RBTC. However, this research did not cater for RBTC analysis after an artifact change and the source code was not catered for the class inheritance and polymorphism, and these could be viewed as future related works.