Test Generation from Business Rules

Enterprise applications are difficult to test because their intended functionality is either not described precisely enough or described in cumbersome business rules. It takes a lot of effort on the part of a test architect to understand all the business rules and design tests that "cover" them, i.e., exercise all their constituent scenarios. Part of the problem is that it takes a complicated set up sequence to drive an application to a state in which a business rule can even fire. In this paper, we present a business rule modeling language that can be used to capture functional specification of an enterprise system. The language makes it possible to build tool support for rule authoring, so that obvious deficiencies in rules can be detected mechanically. Most importantly, we show how to mechanically generate test sequences--i.e., test steps and test data--needed to exercise these business rules. To this end, we translate the rules into logical formulae and use constraint solving to generate test sequences. One of our contributions is to overcome scalability issues in this process, and we do this by using a novel algorithm for organizing search through the space of candidate sequences to discover covering sequences. Our results on three case studies show the promise of our approach.