A New Approach to Generating High Quality Test Cases

High quality test cases can effectively detect software errors and ensure software quality. However, except the regular expression-based test generation method, test cases generated from other model-based test generation methods have not contain the whole information of the model, resulting in test inadequacy. And test cases derived from regular expression have the prohibited lengths that cause the sustainable increase of test cost. To obtain high quality test cases, we suggest a new method for test generation by way of regular expression decomposition. Unlike the previous model decomposition techniques, our method lays emphasis on information completeness after regular expression is decomposed. Based on two empirical assumptions, we propose two processes of regular expression decomposition and three decomposition rules. Then we perform a case study to demonstrate our approach. The results show that our approach generates high quality test cases as well as avoids the problem of test complexity.