skip to main content
10.1145/1593105.1593152acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesacm-seConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Automating test case definition using a domain specific language

Published: 28 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Effective test cases are critical to the success of a development effort but their creation requires large amounts of critical resources such as domain expertise. This study explores an approach to automating test case definition in the context of applying a model driven approach to the development of a software product line. In this study, test cases are automatically extracted from use cases, which are specified using a domain specific language (DSL). DSLs are easier for domain experts to use than formal specification languages and are more narrowly focused than natural languages making it easier to build tools. The task is further simplified by restricting the DSL to the scope of the software product line under development. The structure of the DSL and proven patterns of test design provide the clues necessary to be able to automatically extract the test cases. A chain of model-driven tools is used to automate the system test process, which begins with a use case model and ends with automatic execution of system tests.

References

[1]
D. L. Atkins, T. Ball, G. Bruns, and K. Cox. Mawl: a domain-specific language for form-based services. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 25(3):334--346, 1999.
[2]
F. Basanieri, A. Bertolino, and E. Marchetti. The Cow_Suite approach to planning and deriving test suites in UML projects. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2460, 2002.
[3]
B. Beizer. Black-Box Testing: Techniques for Functional Testing of Software and Systems. Wiley, 1995.
[4]
A. Bertolino and S. Gnesi. Use case-based testing of product lines. In Proceedings of the 9th European software engineering conference, pages 355--358, September 2003.
[5]
R. V. Binder. Testing Object-oriented Systems: Models, Tools, and Patterns. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
[6]
L. C. Briand and Y. Labiche. A UML-based approach to system testing. Software and System Modeling, 1(1):10--42, 2002.
[7]
P. Clements and L. M. Northrop. Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns. Professional. Addison-Wesley, 2001.
[8]
P. Fröhlich and J. Link. Automated Test Case Generation from Dynamic Models. In Proceedings of ECOOP 2000-object-oriented programming: 14th European Conference, 2000.
[9]
E. Kamsties, K. Pohl, S. Reis, and A. Reuys. Testing variabilities in use case models. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Product Family Engineering (PFE-5), November 2003.
[10]
Linguistic Computing Laboratory. http://lcl2.uniroma1.it/termextractor/index.jsp, 2007.
[11]
M. Lange. It's testing time! patterns for testing software. In Proceedings of EuroPLOP01, 2001.
[12]
B. Marick. http://www.testing.com/test-patterns/patterns/, 2007.
[13]
J. D. McGregor. Testing a software product line. Technical Report CMU/SEI-2001-TR-022, Software Engineering Institute, 2001.
[14]
J. D. McGregor. Reasoning about the testability of product line components. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Software Product Line Testing, 2005.
[15]
J. D. McGregor. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/ppl, 2007.
[16]
J. D. McGregor and D. A. Sykes. A Practical Guide to Testing Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley, 2001.
[17]
M. Mernik, J. Heering, and A. M. Sloane. When and how to develop domain-specific languages. CSURV: Computing Surveys, 37, 2005.
[18]
C. Nebut, F. Fleurey, Y. Le Traon, and J. M. Jezequel. Automatic test generation: A use case driven approach. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2006.
[19]
K. A. Schneider and J. R. Cordy. AUI: a programming language for developing plastic interactive software. HICSS. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2002., pages 3656--3665, 2002.
[20]
E. G. Sirer and B. N. Bershad. Using production grammars in software testing. In Second Conference on Domain Specific Languages, pages 1--13, 1999.
[21]
A. van Deursen and P. Klint. Little languages: Little maintenance? Journal of Software Maintenance, 10:75--92, 1998.

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Karnaugh-Veitch Maps as Minimal Formal Contract between Textual Requirements and Tests: A Use-Case Based Technical AnalysisElectronics10.3390/electronics1115243011:15(2430)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2022
  • (2019)A Specification-Based Approach to Model Checking Event-Driven SystemsProceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Information and Communication Technology10.1145/3368926.3369703(449-456)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2019
  • (2019)Conformance Testing of Schedulers for DSL-based Model CheckingModel Checking Software10.1007/978-3-030-30923-7_12(208-225)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2019
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
ACMSE '08: Proceedings of the 46th annual ACM Southeast Conference
March 2008
548 pages
ISBN:9781605581057
DOI:10.1145/1593105
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 March 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. domain specific language
  2. ontology
  3. software product line
  4. software testing

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ACM SE08
ACM SE08: ACM Southeast Regional Conference
March 28 - 29, 2008
Alabama, Auburn

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 502 of 1,023 submissions, 49%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)16
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 16 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Karnaugh-Veitch Maps as Minimal Formal Contract between Textual Requirements and Tests: A Use-Case Based Technical AnalysisElectronics10.3390/electronics1115243011:15(2430)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2022
  • (2019)A Specification-Based Approach to Model Checking Event-Driven SystemsProceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Information and Communication Technology10.1145/3368926.3369703(449-456)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2019
  • (2019)Conformance Testing of Schedulers for DSL-based Model CheckingModel Checking Software10.1007/978-3-030-30923-7_12(208-225)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2019
  • (2018)TSTLInternational Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT)10.1007/s10009-016-0445-y20:1(57-78)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2018
  • (2015)A domain-specific language for automatic generation of checkers2015 International Conference on Data and Software Engineering (ICoDSE)10.1109/ICODSE.2015.7436963(7-12)Online publication date: Nov-2015
  • (2012)Automatic Coverage Evaluation for a Medical Expert SystemProceedings of the 2012 Ninth International Conference on Information Technology - New Generations10.1109/ITNG.2012.77(867-872)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2012
  • (2012)Reducing test effortInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2012.04.00754:10(1092-1106)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012
  • (2010)An integration testing approach based on test patterns and MDA techniquesProceedings of the 8th Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/2581507.2581521(1-16)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2010
  • (2009)Combinatorial Approach for Automated Platform Diversity TestingProceedings of the 2009 Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances10.1109/ICSEA.2009.28(134-139)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2009
  • (2007)Testing techniques in software engineeringundefinedOnline publication date: 1-Jan-2007

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media