Generating test cases and procedures from use cases in dynamic software product lines

Abstract

Software engineering is systematically evolving to address the production of families of systems instead of single products. This evolution comes at a price, it is now essential to deal with variability at both design and execution time. Developing test cases and procedures for a whole family of systems considering this dynamicity (variability at runtime) can be challenging. We propose a method to generate tests from use case specifications expressed in a controlled natural language, yet considering the variability and dynamicity in those specifications. We evaluate our method against use case specifications of a family of mobile and context-aware systems. Experimenting our method, we could measure that developing test cases and procedures becomes around 40+ faster when using our approach, opposed to manual development of tests under the same conditions.