The Design of a Test Case Definition Language

Unit testing of software requires the construction of large amounts of supporting software Test drivers and stubs are needed to isolate the unit under test from other units and test cases speci cations need to be translated into compilable code Constructing test software is as time consuming and as fault prone as any other software and sometimes more so To support testers there are tools that can automatically generate test code from test case speci cations that are similar to the test case speci cation These tools include a test case de nition language in which the test cases are stated and a test script generator that generates com pilable code from the test case de nitions Even so testers often have to resort to writing source code for test cases requiring features unavailable in the test case de nition language To learn more about how a better test case de nition language could be constructed we have designed and implemented a test script generator and a test case de nition language This paper gives an overview of some of our experiences and some of our ideas for future work