Automated Transition from Use Cases to UML State Machines to Support State-Based Testing

Abstract

Use cases are commonly used to structure and document requirements while UML state machine diagrams often describe the behavior of a system and serve as a basis to automate test case generation in many model-based testing (MBT) tools. Therefore, automated support for the transition from use cases to state machines would provide significant, practical help for testing system requirements. Additionally, traceability could be established through automated transformations, which could then be used for instance to link requirements to design decisions and test cases, and assess the impact of requirements changes. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate state machine diagrams from use cases while establishing traceability links. Our approach is implemented in a tool, which we used to perform three case studies, including an industrial case study. The results show that high quality state machine diagrams can be generated, which can be manually refined at reasonable cost to support MBT. Automatically generated state machines showed to largely conform to the actual system behavior as evaluated by a domain expert.