Choosing a Test Modeling Language: A Survey

Deployment of model-based testing involves many difficulties that have slowed down its industrial adoption. The leap from traditional scripted testing to model-based testing seems as hard as moving from manual to automatic test execution. Two key factors in the deployment are the language used to define the test models, and the language used for defining the test objectives. Based on our experience, we survey the different types of languages and sketch solutions based on different approaches, considering the testing organization, the system under test, etc. The types of languages we cover include among others domain-specific, test-specific as well as generic design languages. We note that there are no best practices, but provide general guidelines for various cases.