Research On Software Test Case Generation Method Based On UML Statecharts

Software testing is playing a more and more important role in the process of software development, which penetrates the whole life cycle of software definition and development. And the key point in software testing is the design of test cases, which mainly depends on the software requirement and design and should satisfy the adequacy criteria of testing. The research in this paper belongs to the category of software testing based on specification description.Test case design based on specification is a new technique and to a certain extend is better than the former testing techniques. This paper mainly studies the test case generation technique based on UML statecharts specification description. UML is a semi-formal language and cannot be described by precise semanteme, so OOZS should be used to formalize the statecharts. Through the above method, the UML statecharts is transformed into FREE model. FREE model is an extended finite state machine, whose compound state migration parallels the one in UML statecharts and the states configuration is just an abstraction of UML states. Definitely, UML statecharts is equal to FREE model.Graph Theory has accumulated a lot of theories after more than 200 year's development. In the material meaning, UML statecharts can be viewed as graph of graph theory, so this paper introduces graph theory to guide test cases generation. For the adequacy criteria of testing, the paper still adopts the classical criteria proposed by A.J.Offutt, namely states coverage criteria, migration coverage criteria, migration cross coverage criteria and complete decision coverage criteria. In order to illuminate the method, an example-Drink vending machine-is used in this paper.