Model Based Approach to Software Testing

Software testing is becoming more and more difficult task every day because in the current software engineering cycle the design and testing activities are separated, which leads to a situation where test cases are not in harmony with the actual application. One way to solve this problem is to take a model of the application into use, which can be, e.g., a user interface model and from which the test cases can be derived automatically. This technique is known as model based testing. The model can also be used for, e.g., automatic code generation. The main objectives of this thesis were to find a suitable way to deploy the model based approach into an organization, to develop a model based testing tool in order to test the approach and to show proof of financial benefits of the approach. The thesis is divided into two parts. First, in the literature part, the model based approach is explored thoroughly. In the second part a suggestion for the deployment of model based approach into an organization is presented, a model based testing tool implementation based on that suggestion is reviewed and a comparison between traditional testing methods and model based testing is conducted. The comparison between the testing methods showed that model based testing brings financial benefits to the organization. By using model based testing, a lot of time was saved in the test execution compared to the traditional testing methods.