Test Case Design Using Conditioned Slicing of Activity Diagram

For testing software, test case generation is the most important part. The automation of specification based test case generation needs formal or semi formal specification. As a semiformal modeling, UML is widely used to describe analysis and design specification by both academia and industry. Thus UML models become the sources of test case generation naturally. This paper proposes a method to generate test cases from UML activity diagrams. We have proposed conditioned slicing as a general slicing framework for test case generation from activity diagrams. Our method first builds a flow dependence graph from an ordinary UML activity diagram and then applies conditioned slicing on a predicate node of the graph, to generate test cases. It minimizes the number of test cases generated while deriving all practically useful test cases. The effectiveness of a test case is based on how well the test covers and exercises the modeled behaviors. Our proposed method satisfies high path coverage criterion.