Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC '05),
IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, pp. 55-63 (2005)

Identification of Categories and Choices in Activity Diagrams 1

T.Y. Chen 2 , Pak-Lok Poon 3 , Sau-Fun Tang 2 , and T.H. Tse 4

[paper from IEEE Xplore | paper from IEEE digital library | technical report TR-2005-07]

 ABSTRACT

The choice relation framework CHOC'LATE provides a systematic skeleton for constructing test cases from specifications. An early stage of the framework is to identify a set of categories and choices from the specification, which is not a trivial task when this document is largely informal and complex. Despite the difficulty, the identification task is very important because the quality of the identified categories and choices will affect the comprehensiveness of the test cases and, hence, the chance of revealing software faults. This paper alleviates the problem by introducing a technique for identifying categories and choices from the activity diagrams in the specification. This technique also helps determine the relations between some pair of choices in the choice relation table — an essential step of CHOC'LATE for the subsequent generation of test cases.

Keywords: Activity diagrams, category-partition method, choice relation framework, classification-tree method, specification-based testing, test frame.

1. This research is supported in part by grants of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project nos. 517704 and 702901), an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (project no. DP 0345147), and a grant of The University of Hong Kong.
2. Centre for Software Analysis and Testing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn 3122, Australia.
3. School of Accounting and Finance, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
4. (Corresponding author.)
Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
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