Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 - (Page 49)

Luis Fernández-Sanz and Pedro J. Lara-Bercial Best Practices Special Test Case Generation, UML, And Eclipse Encouraging good practices to ensure software quality Automatic test case generation has long been on developers’ wishlists, and a promising approach to implementing it is the use of state diagrams to describe interactions. The idea is that diagrams can guide the generation of test cases based on the assumption that user activity with the program is modeled by the diagram. The approach we propose in this article is to link requirements expressed in UML format with a testgeneration method we call “AQUABUS” (esp.uem.es/ aquabus/index.htm). To do so, we use UML models stored in an Eclipse project to create a plug-in called “AGAPE” (also available at esp.uem.es/aquabus/ index.htm) that automatically generates test cases from software specifications based on use cases and activity diagrams. Our approach with AQUABUS is to extend an activity diagram to include information about the use and severity of possible failures for each element as a starting point for the generation of test cases. AQUABUS creates a list of paths from the initial state to the ending one, then ranks them in order of priority using the information about probability of use and cost/severity of possible failures. This approach is in sync with commonly used procedures for generating test cases based on the UI. However, this isn’t practical if you can’t support some type of tool or automated environment. So in this article, we present a solution that uses Eclipse to develop solutions that integrate UML modeling with test-generation aids. Luis is an assistant professor of computer science at Universidad de Alcala. Pedro is director of the Computer Systems Department at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. They can be contacted at lufesa@ computer.org and pedro.lara@uem.es, respectively. AGAPE: A Test Case Generation Tool AGAPE is a test generation plug-in for Eclipse. It is based on the EclipseUML (www.omondo.com) UML modeling plug-in and the Eclipse Modeling Framework (www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf) for diagramming. AGAPE uses the XMI definition of the activity diagrams associated with use cases as an input so you can complement the diagram with additional information about: • Input data in specific states where users have to enter information in the system. • Probability of “execution” for each transition (arrow) in the diagram. • Severity (cost of experiencing an error) associated with the execution of an activity of the diagram. AGAPE provides the following functions when using UML models to design tests: • Modeling UML activity diagrams within the standard structure of an Eclipse project, allowing that analysts allocate probability and/or cost information to diagram elements to determine risk level associated to each path (scenario of the use case); November 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 49 http://esp.uem.es/aquabus/index.htm http://esp.uem.es/aquabus/index.htm http://www.omondo.com http://esp.uem.es/aquabus/index.htm http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf http://esp.uem.es/aquabus/index.htm http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer's Notebook Saving Open Source Conversations iPhone Building Your Own Web Server Green Telnet What's New In Boost Threads? Testing Service Oriented Architectures Test Case Generation, UML, and Eclipse Unit Testing Web Services C3 Programming The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames Effective Concurrency

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

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