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In safety critical domains, system test cases are often derived from functional requirements in natural language (NL) and traceability between requirements and their corresponding test cases is usually mandatory. The definition of test cases is therefore time-consuming and error prone, especially so given the quickly rising complexity of embedded systems in many critical domains. Though considerable research has been devoted to automatic generation of system test cases from NL requirements, most of the proposed approaches require significant manual intervention or additional, complex behavioral modelling. This significantly hinders their applicability in practice. In this paper, we propose Use Case Modelling for System Tests Generation (UMTG), an approach that automatically generates executable system test cases from use case specifications and a domain model, the latter including a class diagram and constraints. Our rationale and motivation are that, in many environments, including that of our industry partner in the reported case study, both use case specifications and domain modelling are common and accepted practice, whereas behavioural modelling is considered a difficult and expensive exercise if it is to be complete and precise. In order to extract behavioral information from use cases and enable test automation, UMTG employs Natural Language Processing (NLP), a restricted form of use case specifications, and constraint solving.

We present UMTG, a toolset for automatically generating executable and traceable system test cases from use case specifications. UMTG employs Natural Language Processing (NLP), a restricted form of use case specifications, and constraint solving. Use cases are expected to follow a template with restriction rules that reduce imprecision and enable NLP. NLP is used to capture the control flow implicitly described in use case specifications. Finally, to generate test input, constraint solving is applied to OCL constraints referring to the domain model of the system. UMTG is integrated with two tools that are widely adopted in industry, IBM Doors and Rhapsody. UMTG has been successfully evaluated on an industrial case study.

In safety critical domains, system test cases are often derived from functional requirements in natural language (NL) and traceability between requirements and their corresponding test cases is usually mandatory. The definition of test cases is therefore time-consuming and error prone, especially so given the quickly rising complexity of embedded systems in many critical domains. Though considerable research has been devoted to automatic generation of system test cases from NL requirements, most of the proposed approaches re- quire significant manual intervention or additional, complex behavioral modelling. This significantly hinders their appli- cability in practice. In this paper, we propose Use Case Modelling for System Tests Generation (UMTG), an approach that automatically generates executable system test cases from use case spec- ifications and a domain model, the latter including a class diagram and constraints. Our rationale and motivation are that, in many environments, including that of our industry partner in the reported case study, both use case specifica- tions and domain modelling are common and accepted prac- tice, whereas behavioural modelling is considered a difficult and expensive exercise if it is to be complete and precise. In order to extract behavioral information from use cases and enable test automation, UMTG employs Natural Language Processing (NLP), a restricted form of use case specifica- tions, and constraint solving.

In safety critical domains, system test cases are often derived from functional requirements in natural language (NL) and traceability between requirements and their corresponding test cases is usually mandatory. The definition of test cases is therefore time-consuming and error prone, especially so given the quickly rising complexity of embedded systems in many critical domains. Though considerable research has been devoted to automatic generation of system test cases from NL requirements, most of the proposed approaches re- quire significant manual intervention or additional, complex behavioral modelling. This significantly hinders their appli- cability in practice. In this paper, we propose Use Case Modelling for System Tests Generation (UMTG), an approach that automatically generates executable system test cases from use case spec- ifications and a domain model, the latter including a class diagram and constraints. Our rationale and motivation are that, in many environments, including that of our industry partner in the reported case study, both use case specifica- tions and domain modelling are common and accepted prac- tice, whereas behavioural modelling is considered a difficult and expensive exercise if it is to be complete and precise. In order to extract behavioral information from use cases and enable test automation, UMTG employs Natural Language Processing (NLP), a restricted form of use case specifica- tions, and constraint solving.

Currently, in a Model-Driven Engineering environment, it is a difficult and challenging task to fully automate model-driven testing because this demands complete and unambiguous models as input. Although some approaches have been developed to generate test cases from models, they require rigorous assessment of the completeness of the derivation rules. This paper proposes the plan and design of a controlled experiment that analyses a test case generation strategy for the purpose of evaluating its completeness from the viewpoint of those testers who will use a Communication Analysis-based requirements model. We will compare the abstract test cases obtained by applying (i) manual derivation without derivation rules with (ii) manual derivation with transformation rules; and both these strategies against a case of automated generation using transformation rules.