Test Scenario Generation for Reliability Tactics from UML Sequence Diagram

In safety-critical systems (e.g. Ship control system, avionics system), various reliability tactics are applied for guaranteeing the safe operation of the system. Therefore, much more attentions during the testing process are expected to be paid on these tactics. However, since developers cannot identify the reliability tactics from the system design effectively, the traditional testing approaches cannot obtain the test scenarios associated with reliability tactics directly. Based on our previous works about the aspect specifications of reliability tactics, we propose an approach for generating the test scenarios associated with reliability tactics from Sequence Diagram of Unified Modeling Language (UML). Owing to the separation of reliability tactics from the base model, the Label Transition Systems (LTSs) of the base and tactic aspect model can be obtained as intermediate models of generation process respectively. Then the action sequences of above LTSs are generated. Following the proposed principles, we can acquire the test scenarios associated with reliability tactics through integrating the action sequences of tactic aspect models with the ones of the base model. An avionics system is used to evaluate the availability of our approach. The results show that 1) our approach can effectively identify the test scenarios associated with reliability tactics from all possible test scenarios of system design, 2) the aspect specifications of reliability tactics can alleviate the input effort of test scenario generation for different functional fragments. We also exemplify the advantage of our approach for supporting the model changes.