ABSTRACT

Testing is an important means to ensure the quality of software systems. Contract specification can be used to formally specify the cluster level of object-oriented software, which can then be tested using TACCLE, an advanced methodology for object-oriented testing. The use of formal specifications as a testing base has many advantages. However, such specifications are not easily understood and therefore not widely used in the software industry. On the other hand, UML, a semi-formal modeling language, is becoming increasingly popular and widely accepted. In particular, UML interaction diagrams specify the dynamic, interacting behavior among the objects of an object-oriented system. If the transformation of UML interaction diagrams into Contract specifications can be automated, the TACCLE methodology can be applied directly to test object-oriented software at the cluster level. In this paper, a method to transform UML interaction diagrams into Contract specifications is proposed based on the UML meta-model. A prototype has been developed.

1. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant #60173038, the Guangdong Province Science Foundation under Grant #010421, and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong under CERG Grant #714504. 2. Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China. 3. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong. Email:

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