An Empirical Study of Test Cases Selection by Applying Criteria to Activity Diagram

Abstract

In principle, structural coverage criterion enables the evaluation of test results and the automation of test execution; however, it is limited in that it cannot be applied to specification based testing. Model-Based Testing is one of the solutions used to overcome this limitation. We propose an approach in which UML activity diagrams are used as a model. Once these activity diagrams are generated from program specifications, test cases are selected systematically according to the coverage criteria identified for the activity diagrams. Applying criteria to specification-based testing is very helpful for programmers who are supposed to write tests before source codes in Agile developments. With our proposed approach, they design tests in accordance with test models rather than their intuition. In this paper, we report on an empirical study conducted in which our approach generated a more effective suite of test cases than that of the Siemens Suite.