Review on formalizing use cases and scenarios: Scenario based testing

Abstract

Software Testing is an important activity used for quality assurance, reliability estimation, validation and verification of software products under development. There is a need for effective testing techniques for larger, complex and safety critical software applications in different fields of life such as defense, medical, automobiles and control systems for different products. Recent approaches have been taken by the researcher to use UML models for the purpose of software testing. Test cases may be generated from the artifacts used in requirement and design specifications or it is produced from the code of software. The former is more advantageous over the later for test case generations and contributes more positively in software development process; although both has its own vital roles. Much research has been done and even in progress for software testing using UML diagrams. In this paper we have gone through a literature review on different techniques proposed for testing from UML models. This work focuses on finding the existing approaches of software testing that adopted the way of formalizing the user requirements using use case scenarios and use case diagrams. Then these approaches are evaluated using some parameters i.e. support for inter-scenario dependency, consistency check, initial artifact and the target formalization by each approach. This paper will make help to the researcher interested in the field of software testing using the artifacts in the requirement and design specifications of software application under development.