Improving tests infrastructure through a model-based approach

Software tests have a high impact on the cost of software development. In practice, they are generally created at random and without any methodology, and do not have sufficient documentation. Commonly used approaches also perform the tests outside the application environment (e.g. web servers and containers). Besides, the test cases are usually restricted to target business components behavior, leaving a huge gap by not evaluating the presentation layer. Most of these practices can be explained by the overhead required to maintain manually the whole test artifacts. Applying a Model-based Approach (MBA), the creation and maintenance of test artifacts can be automated. This paper proposes a method that applies the Model-driven Architecture (MDA), a strategy of MBA, to determine the flow of test cases. The proposed method was based on the use of Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams. These diagrams allow determining the test flows and the objective of each activity, such as testing of business and presentation layers. Moreover, the generated test artifacts allow for performing the tests inside the application environment.