A Novel Approach to Generate Test Cases from UML Activity Diagrams

Model-based test case generation is gaining acceptance to the software practitioners. Advantages of this are the early detection of faults, reducing software development time etc. In recent times, researchers have considered different UML diagrams for generating test cases. Few work on the test case generation using activity diagrams is reported in literatures. However, the existing work consider activity diagrams in method scope and mainly follow UML 1.x for modeling. In this paper, we present an approach of generating test cases from activity diagrams using UML 2.0 syntax and with use case scope. We consider a test coverage criterion, called activity path coverage criterion. The test cases generated using our approach are capable of detecting more faults like synchronization faults, loop faults unlike the existing approaches.