Transforming context-aware application development model into a testing model

Abstract

Software testing aims at ensuring the quality of a software product. Context-aware applications are emerging applications that are capable to sense their environment and adapt to situational context to provide better user experience. Context-aware applications pose many challenges for software testing such as defining test adequacy criteria, generating test data, developing context-aware test cases etc. Test case generation process for context-aware applications can be automated using a model based testing technique. To attain this goal with maximum degree of automation, it is required to transform development model into a test model automatically. In this study, we propose a typecast of activity node of UML activity diagram, called Context-Aware Activity for modelling context-aware applications. We have also developed an approach for automatic transformation of the development model i.e., UML activity diagram with Context-aware Activity typecast into a testing model i.e. function nets. This testing model is used to automate test case generation and we have illustrated how to generate context-aware test cases using our proposed approach.