A Novel Approach to Generate Test Cases Using Class and Sequence Diagrams

It is very important in today's highly dynamic environment with changing requirements to develop test plan at each stage of the Software Development Life Cycle. Owing to the ever changing requirements, adequate updation in the requirement specifications is unavoidable. Due to lack of proper updation in the requirements, inconsistencies creep up. Research shows that number of software fail on account of these inconsistencies because proper testing is not possible on archaic requirements. Further, the increasing complexity of the projects make manual testing impossible. This calls for automatic testing of specifications to keep a check on the inconsistencies. Most of the earlier approaches to testing specifications use intermediate forms that makes automation difficult. In this paper, we will present a novel approach to automatic test case generation that integrates information from UML class and sequence diagrams and at the same time does not use any intermediate form. Users input the diagram information in the form of XMI files. These files are processed to extract the environment variables from the class diagrams and test sequences from sequence diagram and finally generate the test cases by applying Robustness Testing on the test sequence generated. Thus we avoid the intermediate forms as well as make automation an easier task.