Test Generation from UML Sequence Diagrams

Model-driven engineering approaches aim at avoiding productivity, model quality and model maintenance problems that arise when models are used for documentation only, by generating executable applications from models. However, in many cases, the level of detail of the models needed to generate complete applications is too much or only effective for specific domains. For those cases where it is not practical to build complete models and generate complete applications from them, we propose a lightweight approach, applicable at different levels (unit, integration and system testing), that combines partial application generation from structural models with test generation from partial behavioral models. To demonstrate the approach, we developed a plug-in that adds to the code generation capabilities of an existing UML modeling tool, the capability of generating executable tests from sequence diagrams acting also as parameterized test scenarios, including some novel features as compared to existing model-based testing tools.