An approach for test case generation for polymorphic interactions from UMLsequence diagrams

Abstract

Software testing is a crucial part in software development. It has been discovered that object-oriented software needs different testing techniques due to its unique features. Polymorphism is one of the prominent features in object-oriented paradigm. This research presents an approach for testing object-oriented software focusing on polymorphism feature. The test approach uses UML sequence diagrams as test specification and aims at finding defects which are the result of unconformity between a sequence diagram and its implementation. The approach covers the model of message sending sequence model for representing a sequence of message sent between objects in an interaction. Moreover the approach supports verification of the actual message sending sequence occurred in test execution against the expected message sending sequence from a UML sequence diagram. The approach also includes test case generation and test adequacy criteria, which focus on polymorphism. A tool is implemented based on the approach for evaluation purpose. The evaluation of the tool effectively reflects the capability of the test approach in various situations.