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The adoption of fault detection techniques during initial stages of software development life cycle urges to improve reliability of a software product. Specification-based testing is one of the major criterions to detect faults in the requirement specification or design of a software system. However, due to the non-availability of implementation details, test case generation from formal specifications become a challenging task. As a novel approach, the proposed work presents a methodology to generate test cases from OCL (Object constraint Language) formal specification using Category Partitioning Method (CPM). The experiment results indicate that the proposed methodology is more effective in revealing specification based faults. Furthermore, it has been observed that OCL and CPM form an excellent combination for performing functional testing at the earliest to improve software quality with reduced cost.

Keywords

Software Testing, Specification-Based Testing, OCL, CPM, Formal Specification.

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References

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Components Impact Analyzer With Genetic Algorithm

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Authors

D. Jeyamala ¹, K. Sabari Nathan ¹, S. Balamurugan ¹, A. Jalila ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Applications, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, IN

Source

ICTACT Journal on Soft Computing, Vol 3, No 4 (2013), Pagination: 576-586

Abstract

High quality software can be obtained by means of rigorous testing of all the components of the software. This research work has proposed an automated software testing framework that performs a mutant based components impact analysis to identify the higher critical components from the Software Under Test (SUT). In this work, the mutants are automatically generated by injecting faults in the original program and they are used to identify the impact over the other components in the SUT. The generated mutants are executed using a suite of test cases to identify their impact over the other components of the system. Based on their impact level, the critical components are identified and then rigorously verified using the test cases generated using Genetic Algorithm (GA) based approach with branch coverage and mutation score based test adequacy criterion as the fitness functions. For unit testing, the branch coverage based test case adequacy criteria is used to test whether all the branches have been covered or not. In integration testing, the components are tested against the test cases generated using GA by means of identifying the execution trace of each method and each intermediate results is compared against the expected output stored in the repository. The testing tool named as "JImpact Arbiter" developed as part of this work has carried out all these tasks in an automated way and has generated various graphs for the purpose of visualization.

Keywords

Critical Components, Impact Analysis, Mutation Analysis, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Branch Coverage Value (BCV).

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