Knowledge transition: Discovering workflow models from functional tests

Independent testing in the enterprise is largely a manual activity with manual test design and manual creation of test scripts. Enterprises often outsource independent testing to third party service providers. During knowledge transition, the service provider test team has to understand the IT system functionality and the test scripts which can be non-trivial as currency of documents could be a challenge requiring high SME involvement. In this paper we describe a novel approach and a tool to recover workflows directly from test procedures listed in test scripts to automatically construct a formal workflow model. The mined model can help gain understanding of the IT system from an outside in perspective as well as the manually written test scripts without having to execute them manually. We present experimental results on real life test scripts that show that the approach is feasible and has high degree of accuracy.