Evaluation of Qtronic for Model-Based Testing

Most software organisations place substantial amounts of money on testing; consequently efficiency improvements in that area will reap great dividends. Testing is the prime means used, by most organisations, to ensure that the produced software is of sufficient quality. The most common approach employed by the industry, is the production of test cases, which describe steps to be executed on the software, together with the expected output. Often those test cases are described in a manner that enables automatic execution by software, without human intervention. This Master thesis investigates another approach to testing, rather than the typical approach of human constructed test cases. The approach is called Model-Based Testing, MBT, which is a concept that spans many different approaches and technologies. For this thesis, the investigation of Model-Based Testing is focused on the tool Qtronic from Conformiq. The client of this Master thesis is Tieto Umeå. To ensure that conclusions are grounded in reality, the approach has been to analyse the feasibility of Qtronic on existing already tested test objects. The focus has been on the telecom domain and the test objects come from that domain. Results from the Master thesis, suggest that the approach should not be adopted for Tieto Umeå. Even though Qtronic could work for testing needs at the component level, as it did for the pilot test object at the component level, it is indicated that the Model-Based Testing approach is not typically geared for testing at component level.