Integrating Requirements Specification and Model-Based Testing in Agile Development

In agile development, Requirements Engineering (RE) and testing have to cope with a number of challenges such as continuous requirement changes and the need for minimal and manageable documentation. In this sense, extensive research has been conducted to automatically generate test cases from (structured) natural language documents using Model-Based Testing (MBT). However, the imposed structure may impair agile practices or test case generation. In this paper, inspired by cooperation with industry partners, we propose CLARET, a notation that allows the creation of use case specifications using natural language to be used as central artifacts for both RE and MBT practices. A tool set supports CLARET specification by checking syntax of use cases structure as well as providing visualization of flows for use case revisions. We also present exploratory studies on the use of CLARET to create RE documents as well as on their use as part of a system testing process based on MBT. Results show that, with CLARET, we can document use cases in a cost-effective way. Moreover, a survey with professional developers shows that CLARET use cases are easy to read and write. Furthermore, CLARET has been successfully applied during specification, development and testing of industrial applications.