Automatic generation algorithm of expected results for testing of component-based software system

Abstract

ContextA component-based software (CBS) system is a typical example of a composite component, which is composed of two or more atomic components. In the test of a CBS system, it is necessary to automatically generate expected results because they are compared with the actual results. ObjectiveThis paper proposes an automatic generation algorithm of expected results for the testing of a CBS system. MethodThe algorithm analyzes Input/Output (I/O) relationships of a CBS system to identify inputs that influence its outputs. Then, the algorithm uses test cases of atomic components for each input and automatically generates expected results. To evaluate the proposed approach, we compare the proposed approach with the other I/O relationship based approach via two case studies which are the CBS systems for guide robot. The comparison shows the effectiveness of our approach. ResultsTo verify effectiveness of the proposed approach, we measure the cost of manual generation of expected results for each case study. The costs are from 0.001 to 0.015 in the first case study, and are from 0.590 to 0.998 in the second case study. ConclusionThis proposed approach reduces the time-consuming and error-prone task which manually generates expected results for the testing of a CBS system.