Test by Contract for UML-Based Software Component Testing

This paper presents a new contract-based software component testing (SCT) technique, test by contract (TbC), which extends the design by contract concept to the SCT domain, and leverages it with UML-based testing at the modeling level to design model-level test contracts for UML-based SCT. We introduce a new concept of contract for testability as the principal TbC goal, and develop a set of important contract-oriented concepts (e.g. test contract, effectual contract scope, internal/external test contract), and useful test criteria for effective model-based testability improvement. A practical step-wise TbC working process is developed to show how to put the TbC technique into practice for contract-based testing activities to undertake UML-based SCT with a case study.