Test case generation using dependency information derived from architecture description

Abstract

A reliable system can be realized if each individual component that constitutes the system is reliable and components are integrated correctly. Therefore, inter-actions of integrated components as well as each individual component should be tested to achieve improved quality of a component-based system. Since architecture descriptions provide information about configuration and communication of components in a component-based system, they can be employed for generating test cases of a component-based software system. We first extract control dependency and identify data elements from architecture description. Then a test model is constructed using the information extracted in the previous step. Next, we identify test units named as Observable Functional Units(OFUs) from a test model and determine the sequence of OFUs by considering dependency between OFUs. We have conducted a case study with the Coffee Vending Machine(CVM) example to demonstrate that test cases can be indeed obtained by utilizing our method.