State-Based Tests Suites Automatic Generation Tool (STAGE-1)

Abstract

State diagrams are widely used to model software artifacts, making state-based testing an interesting research topic. When conducting research on state-based testing for evaluating different testing criteria, often there is a need to devise numerous test suites in a systematic way according to selection criteria such as all-edges, all-transition-pairs, or the transition tree (W-method). Moreover, one also needs to satisfy each criterion in as many ways as possible to account for possible stochastic phenomena within each criterion. The main issue is then: how to automate the generation of as many, or even all, the different test suites for each criterion? This paper presents the first part of a framework, an automation tool chain that generates test trees from a state machine diagram, extracts test cases from the generated trees, and composes a test suite from each generated tree. This tool is the first to generate all possible distinctive trees using depth and breadth first graph traversal algorithms. The tool chain should be of interest to researchers in state-based testing as well as practitioners who are interested in alternative adequate test suites especially for comparing the effectiveness of the different test suites satisfying one criterion and the effectiveness of the other different criteria.