Test scenario prioritization for object-oriented systems using UML diagram

Abstract

The exponential growth in the complexity of product requirements has raised the importance of software testing. Software change management is one of the major challenge and regression testing provides a solution in this regard. Regresion testing is performed to find out the effect of the modified component on the other components present in the application. Here, a behavioural model i.e. an UML State Machine Diagram (SMD) is used to model the system requirements. Further, an intermediate State Machine Graph (SMG) is constructed from SMD. The test scenarios are generated by identifying the paths those are linearly independent of each other. These test scenarios are validated for code coverage using dynamic program analysis technique. Then, by traversing the SMG, nodes are identified those got affected due to the different change carried away in the software. A repository is maintained to store the information about affected nodes periodically. Next time, during regression testing, pattern of nodes those are frequently affected, are identified from the stored data and these patterns helps in test case prioritization. Two more criterias i.e. functional priority set by the client and number of times the user accessed the user interface are also added up. Further, it calculates the total priority value of a test scenarios and test-scenarios are arranged in depending upon their total priority value. Moelling dynamic nature of the application as well as applying mining on the historical data makes the proposed approach more efficient when compared with the related works.