A Novel Approach for Test Case Generation Using Activity Diagram

Testing is an important part of quality assurance in the software development life cycle. As the complexity and size of software grow, more and more time and man power are required for testing the software. Manual testing is very much labor-intensive and error-prone. So there is a pressing need to develop the automatic testing strategy. Test case generation is the most important part of the testing efforts. Test cases can be designed based on source code but this makes test case generation difficult for testing at cluster level. Therefore, it is required to generate test cases automatically from the design documents. Also this approach holds an added advantage of obtaining test cases early in the software development life cycle (SDLC), there by making test planning more effective. Our approach first constructs the activity diagram for the given problem and then randomly generates initial test cases, for a program under testing (PUT). Then, by running the program with the generated test cases, we can get the corresponding program execution traces (PET). Next, we compare these traces with the constructed activity diagram according to the specific coverage criteria. We use a rule based frame work to generate a reduced test case set, which meets the test adequacy criteria. Advantage of our approach is that it achieves maximum path coverage.