Improving Test Case Generation from UML Statecharts by Using Control, Data and Communication Dependencies

Dependence relations have been used in slicing of programs in order to remove statements that do not influence certain criteria of interest. More recently, slicing has also been applied at the specification level in order to obtain a reduced model pertinent to the selected criteria. Such models have been used for different verification and validation activities. In this article we present an approach that uses control, data and communication dependences in order to enhance test purposes with refuse transitions. A test purpose represents an abstraction of the original model describing a scenario of interest, which should be tested. The refuse transitions are used during the test case generation process in order to limit the state space being searched. As automating test case generation activities is of great importance the generation of the test purposes and of the test cases consequently is fully automatic. We have evaluated the proposed approach on three models from industry and several others from literature. The obtained results indicate an improvement regarding computation time compared to test case generation using unmodified test purposes.