System state coverage through automatic test case generation

Abstract

Achieving reasonable coverage of system states during testing is a non-trivial problem, since the number of system states for practical systems is usually very large. To further complicate the problem, system developers often do not construct a system state model. On the other hand, many modern systems are extremely complex and state-based, making it necessary to ensure satisfactory state coverage during system testing. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically generate system test cases to achieve coverage of system states based on Unified Modeling Language (UML) models constructed during a normal development process. We use UML use case, sequence and statechart models to generate a set of sequences of scenarios that can achieve adequate coverage of system states.