Automatic Test Sequence Generation and Functional Coverage Measurement From UML Sequence Diagrams

Abstract

Sequence diagrams define functional requirements through use cases. However, their visual form limits their usability in the later stages of the development life cycle. This work proposes a method to transform sequence diagrams into graph-based event sequence graphs, allowing the application of graph analysis methods and defining graph-based coverage criteria. This work explores these newfound abilities in two directions. The first is to use coverage criteria along with existing tests to measure their coverage levels, providing a metric of how well they address the scenarios defined in sequence diagrams. The second is to use coverage criteria to automatically generate effective and efficient acceptance test cases based on the scenarios defined in sequence diagrams. The transformation method is validated with over eighty non-trivial projects. The complete method is validated through a non-trivial example. The results show that the test cases generated with the proposed method are more effective at exposing faults and more efficient in test input size than user-generated test cases.