The Design and Implementation of a Modeling Tool for Regular Expressions

Model-based testing has been widely studied to generate test cases from the Finite State Machine (FSM). Due to the limitation of the modeling theory of FSM, it is hard to build a right model for software concurrent behaviors by FSM. Recently, we proposed a theory of test modeling based on regular expressions to construct test models for concurrent systems. To realize and put this theory into practice, we develop a lightweight modeling tool named as Regular-Finite State Machine (RFSM) to support visual modeling with regular expressions. It supports the production of seven operators for describing software behaviors and two methods for constructing the expression model, including the RFSM code editor and the toolbar editor. An algorithm for transforming the model into the extended regular expressions is also introduced.