Proposal of a method to support testing for Java programs with UML

There is an increasing need for effective testing of software for complex safety-critical applications. This paper proposes a supporting method of testing for Java programs by using Unified Modeling Language (UML) in order to improve the reliability of them. The correspondences of source codes in Java and elements of a class diagram, a sequence diagram, and a statechart diagram have been extracted. By using the extracted correspondences as test items in testing, it becomes possible to test effectively the specification of software, the structure of Java programs, the flows of processing of a system, and the flow of transition between states. Moreover, in order to confirm the validity of the proposed method, a prototype tool to support testing for Java programs is implemented. The inputs of this prototype are three diagrams, and the outputs are test items generated from the extracted correspondences. As an example, a source code of blackjack game in Java has been tested by using the test items outputted from the prototype. It has been possible to test 67.2% of the number of lines in the whole source code.