Bridging the Concept to Implementation Gap in Software System Testing

Abstract

The following paper proposes a solution to bridging the ontological gap between the conceptual test specification on the one side and the test implementation on the other. The cause of the gap is the different ontologies used on each side and the different levels of granularity. Whereas on the conceptual side, the ontology of the application is used, and that at an abstract level, on the implementional side, the ontology of the technical architecture is used at a very detailed level. The author proposes here a solution by which the conceptual level is brought down to a level corresponding to the implementation level and with which the notions of both sides are explicitly linked to one another. The key concepts are objects and use cases.