An Automated Impact Analysis Approach for Test Cases based on Changes of Use Case based Requirement Specifications

Abstract

Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is essential to the software development process that identifies the potential effects of changes during the development process. The changing of requirements always impacts on the software testing because some parts of the existing test cases may not be used to test the software. This affects new test cases to be entirely generated from the changed version of software requirements specification that causes a considerable amount of time and effort to generate new test cases to re-test the modified system. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel automatic impact analysis approach of test cases based on changes of use case based requirement specification. This approach enables a framework and CIA algorithm where the impact of test cases is analysed when the requirement specification is changed. To detect the change, two versions as before-change and after-change of the use case model are compared. Consequently, the patterns representing the cause of variable changes are classified and analysed. This results in the existing test cases to be analysed whether they are completely reused, partly updated as well as additionally generated. The new test cases are generated automatically by using the Combination of Equivalence and Classification Tree Method (CCTM). This benefits the level of testing coverage with a minimised number of test cases to be enabled and the redundant test cases to be eliminated. The automation of this approach is demonstrated with the developed prototype tool. The validation and evaluation result with two real case studies from Hospital Information System (HIS) together with perspective views of practical specialists confirms the contribution of this tool that we seek.