AbsCon: A Test Concretizer for Model-Based Testing

Abstract

Test definition and execution is an essential but time-consuming task during system development. To speed up the process, model-based testing and other related approaches propose to generate/write abstract test cases and to concretize them using either transformations, an adapter, or a mixture of the two. QTaste is an industrial data-driven test case definition and execution environment used to perform black-box testing on various kinds of systems. QTaste's test cases are manually written in Python and use an adapter, called test API, to execute operations on the System Under Test (SUT) interfaces. In this paper, we describe AbsCon (Abstract test case Concretizer), a plugin used to generate test cases executable in QTaste based on their definition: i.e., sequences of abstract actions and assertions. AbsCon uses programmer friendly mappings (written in Python) for the SUT's interfaces, actions, and assertions, to generate standard test cases in QTaste format. Rather than having a complete model-based testing transformation chain, the plugin is bridging the gap between existing model-based test case generation tools and an industrial test case execution system using a mix of transformation and adaptation.