Conceptual Software Testing: a New Approach

Abstract

Software testing is an important aspect of the software development life cycle that plays an important role in ensuring quality, applicability, and usefulness of products. UML has been applied in this development from the requirements specification and code generation phases through to testing. New approaches advocate addressing test cases from the initial work on requirements since this would facilitate applying them in the later stages. Hence, several approaches have been investigated for generating test cases from UML diagrams. Nevertheless, using UML diagrams as a conceptual basis for testing may embed ambiguity in semantics and discontinuity in structure, thus negating the advantages of introducing testing aspects at the initial stage of software development. This paper proposes a new diagrammatic approach as a foundation for identifying test cases. The viability of the method is demonstrated by examples that identify test cases utilizing UML use cases.