A Novel Approach for Deriving Test Scenarios and Test Cases from Events

Safety critical systems, real time systems, and event-based systems have a complex set of events and their own interdependency, which makes them difficult to test ma Safety critic Safety critical systems, real time systems, and event-based systems have a complex set of events and their own interdependency, which makes them difficult to test manually. In order to cut down on costs, save time, and increase reliability, the model based testing approach is the best solution. Such an approach does not require applications or codes prior to generating test cases, so it leads to the early detection of faults, which helps in reducing the development time. Several model-based testing approaches have used different UML models but very few works have been reported to show the generation of test cases that use events. Test cases that use events are an apt choice for these types of systems. However, these works have considered events that happen at a user interface level in a system while other events that happen in a system are not considered. Such works have limited applications in testing the GUI of a system. In this paper, a novel model-based testing approach is presented using business events, state events, and control events that have been captured directly from requirement specifications. The proposed approach documents events in event templates and then builds an event-flow model and a fault model for a system. Test coverage criterion and an algorithm are designed using these models to generate event sequence based test scenarios and test cases. Unlike other event based approaches, our approach is able to detect the proposed faults in a system. A prototype tool is developed to automate and evaluate the applicability of the entire process. Results have shown that the proposed approach and supportive tool is able to successfully derive test scenarios and test cases from the requirement specifications of safety critical systems, real time systems, and event based systems