An approach for automatic generation of test cases from UML diagrams

Abstract

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard notation used to model user's requirements for object oriented software systems. With the growing adoption of UML by software developers and researchers, studies have begun to investigate how it can be used to conduct testing. Several approaches of UML-based software testing have been proposed where test cases are derived from UML diagrams based on efficient algorithms. However, these approaches still suffer from three major limitations namely; inadequate test coverage criteria, insufficient diagrams coverages and incompatibility with various UML tools. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved approach for generating test cases from various UML diagrams based on full coverage criteria. To achieve this aim, a robust method for extracting artefacts from the underlying diagrams of the software under test (SUT) was developed, where the artefacts are represented in an intermediate form using a tree and test cases are generated by traversing the contents of the tree. The proposed approach is fully automated and the generated test cases satisfied the criteria defined for the generation process. The novelty of this approach is its systematic rather than ad hoc test case generation from UML diagrams to achieve high test coverage