An enhanced test case generation technique based on activity diagrams

Test case generation is a core phase in any testing process, therefore automating it plays a tremendous role in reducing the time and effort spent during the testing process. This paper proposes an enhanced XML-based automated approach for generating test cases from activity diagrams. The proposed architecture creates a special table called Activity Dependency Table (ADT) for each XML file. The ADT covers all the functionalities in the activity diagram as well as handling the decisions, loops, fork, join, merge, object and conditional threads. Then it automatically generates a directed graph called Activity Dependency Graph (ADG) that is used in conjunction with the ADT to extract all the possible final test cases. The proposed model validates the generated test paths during the generation process to ensure meeting a hybrid coverage criterion. The generated test cases can be sent to any requirements management tool to be traced against the requirements. The proposed model is prototyped on 30 differently sized activity diagrams in different domains An experimental evaluation of the proposed model is done as well. It saves time and effort besides, increases the quality of generated test cases, therefore optimizes the overall performance of the testing process Moreover, the generated test cases can be executed on the system under test using any automatic test execution tool.